COVID-19: Retransmission of official communications in an emerging pandemic.
PLoS One
; 15(9): e0238491, 2020.
Article
in English
| MEDLINE | ID: covidwho-771798
ABSTRACT
As the most visible face of health expertise to the general public, health agencies have played a central role in alerting the public to the emerging COVID-19 threat, providing guidance for protective action, motivating compliance with health directives, and combating misinformation. Social media platforms such as Twitter have been a critical tool in this process, providing a communication channel that allows both rapid dissemination of messages to the public at large and individual-level engagement. Message dissemination and amplification is a necessary precursor to reaching audiences, both online and off, as well as inspiring action. Therefore, it is valuable for organizational risk communication to identify strategies and practices that may lead to increased message passing among online users. In this research, we examine message features shown in prior disasters to increase or decrease message retransmission under imminent threat conditions to develop models of official risk communicators' messages shared online from February 1, 2020-April 30, 2020. We develop a lexicon of keywords associated with risk communication about the pandemic response, then use automated coding to identify message content and message structural features. We conduct chi-square analyses and negative binomial regression modeling to identify the strategies used by official risk communicators that respectively increase and decrease message retransmission. Findings show systematic changes in message strategies over time and identify key features that affect message passing, both positively and negatively. These results have the potential to aid in message design strategies as the pandemic continues, or in similar future events.
Full text:
Available
Collection:
International databases
Database:
MEDLINE
Main subject:
Pneumonia, Viral
/
Coronavirus Infections
/
Communication
/
Communicable Diseases, Emerging
/
Information Dissemination
/
Pandemics
/
Social Media
/
Betacoronavirus
Type of study:
Prognostic study
/
Systematic review/Meta Analysis
Limits:
Humans
Language:
English
Journal:
PLoS One
Journal subject:
Science
/
Medicine
Year:
2020
Document Type:
Article
Affiliation country:
Journal.pone.0238491
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