scholarly journals Social Media and COVID-19: a global study of digital crisis interaction among Gen Z and millennials

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ingrid Volkmer

The COVID-19 pandemic is revealing that global big tech platforms and social media are core sites for continuous engagement with crisis content for young citizens. This study included twenty-four countries from all continents at the time of the heightened COVID-19 crisis, and our survey targeted 18-40 year olds, Millennials and Gen Zs – overall n = 23,483 respondents. Outcomes show that for young citizens across continents, crisis communication is not just about press briefings. Instead, crisis communication is continuous interaction and engagement across their multiple source environments. Young citizens navigate social media, national media, search sites and messaging apps, they engage with peer communities, science and health experts and – across all countries – substantially with the social media content of the World Health Organization (WHO). Overall, they create their own individual crisis narrative based on the sources they use and the insights they select. This report outlines these new crisis communication dimensions within a transnational social media space and offers numerous suggestions for incorporating social media in crisis response strategies.

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-66
Author(s):  
Godwin Ayigbo Owojecho Godwin

The evolution of social media has opened a new vista in digital communication across the world, Nigeria inclusive. Since the confirmation of the index case of Coronavirus in Nigeria, a lot of news on the subject which are largely considered by the World Health Organization to be false, had gone viral on the social media space. This study essentially examines some of those messages on WhatsApp that were circulated across Nigeria.  Five WhatsApp messages collected between March – June, 2020 were analysed using the framework of Austin’s Speech Acts with insights from the Conversational Maxims of Grice’s Cooperative Principles. The main objective of this analysis is to unravel the communicative effects of language. Findings show that the writers of those WhatsApp messages carefully manipulate some linguistic features to make such messages perform some illocutionary acts as well as trigger some perlocutionary moves in the minds of the readers. This buttresses the fact that language is used to achieve both linguistic and non linguistic aims.


2014 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefania Romenti ◽  
Grazia Murtarelli ◽  
Chiara Valentini

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to develop and test a theoretical framework, grounded in managerial and organisational theories of dialogue, through which organisations can take decisions in relation to the most appropriate crisis response strategies for handling social media stakeholders. Design/methodology/approach – The theoretical framework is developed through a conceptual analysis of literature on dialogue, social media and crisis communication. The theoretical framework is then tested in eight different international organisations experiencing a crisis. For each case, different web contents, such as organisations' status updates/posts, links, videos published on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, were analysed using a rhetorical research approach. Findings – The analysed organisations apply different online dialogue strategies according to crisis types and in combination with specific crisis response strategies. Most of the organisations investigated carry on those dialogue strategies suitable to develop consensus (concertative), guide conversations on specific topics or issues (framing), find solutions to the crisis collectively (transformative). Concertative strategies were often associated with informative crisis response strategies, framing strategies with denial and justification crisis response strategies and transformative strategies with corrective actions. Research limitations/implications – By using a dialogic perspective in setting up online conversations with their external stakeholders, the paper proposes a theoretical model to explain companies' decisions in carrying on online dialogues during critical situations and thus contribute to the body of knowledge on online crisis communications. Practical implications – The proposed model can support crisis communicators to manage dialogue's aims and dimensions differently by taking into account both contextual and situational conditions. Originality/value – By integrating management studies on dialogue into crisis communication and social media literature, the authors intend to offer an alternative thinking of organisations' decision-making in relation to crisis response strategies and social media stakeholders.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Styliani Geronikolou ◽  
George Chrousos

UNSTRUCTURED The World Health Organization named the phenomenon of misinformation spread through the social media “infodemics”, and recognized the need to curb it. Misinformation infodemics undermine not only population safety, but also compliance to the suggestions/prophylactic measures recommended in pandemics. The aim of this study was to review the impact of social media on general population fear in “infoveillance” studies during the COVID-19 pandemic. PRISMA protocol was followed and six out of twenty studies were retrieved, meta-analyzed, and had their findings presented in the form of a Forest plot. The summary random and significant event rate was 0.298, 95% CI respectively 0.213 and 0.400, suggesting that social media-circulated misinformation related to COVID-19 triggered public fear and other manifestations. These findings merit special attention by public health authorities. Thus, “infodemiology” and Infoveillance are valid tools in the hands of epidemiologists to help prevent dissemination of false information, with potentially damaging effects.


Abstract: On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) confirmed COVID-19 a pandemic, in response to the more than 1,00,000 confirmed cases globally in more than 100 countries, and the persistent threat of spreading further. Presently, there is no medicine to cure or vaccine to prevent the spread of COVID 19. The only way to curb its menace is taking precautionary measures as advised by Health experts. Social distancing i.e. maintaining a minimum distance of 1-1.5 meter between two individuals is one of the proactive measures advised by WHO. In this paper, an ATMEGA (open source) based Smart wearable device “Manav Rakshak” is proposed. It can be worn while travelling outside home and will help in maintaining the social distancing thereby curb the spread of COVID-19.


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-30
Author(s):  
Muhammad Habibi ◽  
Adri Priadana ◽  
Muhammad Rifqi Ma’arif

The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the COVID-19 outbreak has resulted in more than six million confirmed cases and more than 371,000 deaths globally on June 1, 2020. The incident sparked a flood of scientific research to help society deal with the virus, both inside and outside the medical domain. Research related to public health analysis and public conversations about the spread of COVID-19 on social media is one of the highlights of researchers in the world. People can analyze information from social media as supporting data about public health. Analyzing public conversations will help the relevant authorities understand public opinion and information gaps between them and the public, helping them develop appropriate emergency response strategies to address existing problems in the community during the pandemic and provide information on the population's emotions in different contexts. However, research related to the analysis of public health and public conversations was so far conducted only through supervised analysis of textual data. In this study, we aim to analyze specifically the sentiment and topic modeling of Indonesian public conversations about the COVID-19 on Twitter using the NLP technique. We applied some methods to analyze the sentiment to obtain the best classification method. In this study, the topic modeling was carried out unsupervised using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). The results of this study reveal that the most frequently discussed topic related to the COVID-19 pandemic is economic issues.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Hanane Aboulghazi

The present research paper examines how Moroccan political public authorities’ communication strategies influence Moroccan male and female publics’ feedback, and the perception of government’s crisis response strategies in light of a new atmosphere, a new condition at the pandemic time of the coronavirus Covid-19. The  data is collected  from 132 Moroccan internet users via online survey. It was conducted between May and June, 2020, after the declaration of the state of emergency, the present study gathered concrete information and viewpoints regarding Moroccan male and female internet users’ feedback about political leaders’ communication strategies, trust in different sources and media channels, and perception of the Moroccan political leaders’ crisis communication management.  The findings of the study have revealed that younger male and female publics, who got news from social media, had negative views of authority messages, and expressed more negative opinions of the government’s crisis response and communication strategies as weeks went by. Therefore, trust in public authorities’ decreased as the crisis evolves. Other age group, 60 years or older of the respondents get information about the crisis from institutional political sources and mainstream news media, which have been more aligned with authorities’ information at the start of the health crisis. In addition, women have used multiple media platforms, but they have less direct access to information than do men. While some  progress has been made in  women’s political use of information and news consumption during the outbreak on social media,  on  the  overall,  the  participation  of  women  in both feedback and news consumption is still very limited in Morocco.


Author(s):  
Stephen Gichuhi Kimotho ◽  
Carolyne Nyaboe Nyarang'o

Terrorism targeting corporate bodies remains one the greatest risks to the most critical intangible asset of any organization: reputation. Thus, effective crisis communication is critical during and after terror crisis to mitigate further damage on the reputation. To date, many studies around the globe have tended to focus on the role of the traditional media during terror crisis, paying minimal attention to organisations' use of social media during terror crisis. Using a descriptive qualitative case study, this study examined the role of social media during 2013 Westgate Mall terror attack, in Nairobi, Kenya. Findings revealed that the Interior Ministry (IM) used Twitter as the preferred social media platform to communicate with various stakeholders. Accommodative crisis response strategies were the most used by the IM. However, the ministry was plagued with inaccuracies and inconsistencies in its responses on social media compromising reputation of the government further. Balancing the need for speedy response, accuracy and consistency, remained the greatest challenge for the IM.


Author(s):  
Hyejin Park ◽  
J. Patrick Biddix ◽  
Han Woo Park

Social media platforms provide valuable insights into public conversations. They likewise aid in understanding current issues and events. Twitter has become an important virtual venue where global users hold conversations, share information, and exchange news and research. This study investigates social network structures among Twitter users with regard to the Covid-19 outbreak at its onset and its spread. The data were derived from two Twitter datasets by using a search query, “coronavirus,” on February 28th, 2020, when the coronavirus outbreak was at a relatively early stage. The first dataset is a collection of tweets used in investigating social network structures and for visualization. The second dataset comprises tweets that have citations of scientific research publications regarding coronavirus. The collected data were analyzed to examine numerical indicators of the social network structures, subgroups, influencers, and features regarding research citations. This was also essential to measure the statistical relationships among social elements and research citations. The findings revealed that individuals tend to have conversations with specific people in clusters regarding daily issues on coronavirus without prominent or central voice tweeters. Tweets related to coronavirus were often associated with entertainment, politics, North Korea, and business. During their conversations, the users also responded to and mentioned the U.S. president, the World Health Organization (WHO), celebrities, and news channels. Meanwhile, people shared research articles about the outbreak, including its spread, symptoms related to the disease, and prevention strategies. These findings provide insight into the information sharing behaviors at the onset of the outbreak.


Author(s):  
Stephen Gichuhi Kimotho ◽  
Carolyne Nyaboe Nyarang'o

Terrorism targeting corporate bodies remains one the greatest risks to the most critical intangible asset of any organization: reputation. Thus, effective crisis communication is critical during and after terror crisis to mitigate further damage on the reputation. To date, many studies around the globe have tended to focus on the role of the traditional media during terror crisis, paying minimal attention to organisations' use of social media during terror crisis. Using a descriptive qualitative case study, this study examined the role of social media during 2013 Westgate Mall terror attack, in Nairobi, Kenya. Findings revealed that the Interior Ministry (IM) used Twitter as the preferred social media platform to communicate with various stakeholders. Accommodative crisis response strategies were the most used by the IM. However, the ministry was plagued with inaccuracies and inconsistencies in its responses on social media compromising reputation of the government further. Balancing the need for speedy response, accuracy and consistency, remained the greatest challenge for the IM.


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