The Spread of COVID-19 Crisis Communication by German Public Authorities and Experts on Twitter: Quantitative Content Analysis

The COVID-19 pandemic led to the necessity of immediate crisis communication by public health authorities. In Germany, as in many other countries, people choose social media, including Twitter, to obtain real-time information and understanding of the pandemic and its consequences. Next to authoritie...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:JMIR public health and surveillance 2021-12, Vol.7 (12), p.e31834
Main Authors: Drescher, Larissa S, Roosen, Jutta, Aue, Katja, Dressel, Kerstin, Schär, Wiebke, Götz, Anne
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Application programming interface
Communication
Content analysis
Coronaviruses
COVID-19
COVID-19 vaccines
Crises
Datasets
Health surveillance
Humans
Immunization
Information retrieval
Information sources
Keywords
Multimedia
Multivariate analysis
Original Paper
Pandemics
Public health
SARS-CoV-2
Scientists
Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2
Social Media
Social networks
Stakeholders
Variables
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Summary:The COVID-19 pandemic led to the necessity of immediate crisis communication by public health authorities. In Germany, as in many other countries, people choose social media, including Twitter, to obtain real-time information and understanding of the pandemic and its consequences. Next to authorities, experts such as virologists and science communicators were very prominent at the beginning of German Twitter COVID-19 crisis communication. The aim of this study was to detect similarities and differences between public authorities and individual experts in COVID-19 crisis communication on Twitter during the first year of the pandemic. Descriptive analysis and quantitative content analysis were carried out on 8251 original tweets posted from January 1, 2020, to January 15, 2021. COVID-19-related tweets of 21 authorities and 18 experts were categorized into structural, content, and style components. Negative binomial regressions were performed to evaluate tweet spread measured by the retweet and like counts of COVID-19-related tweets. Descriptive statistics revealed that authorities and experts increasingly tweeted about COVID-19 over the period under study. Two experts and one authority were responsible for 70.26% (544,418/774,865) of all retweets, thus representing COVID-19 influencers. Altogether, COVID-19 tweets by experts reached a 7-fold higher rate of retweeting (t =26.94, P
ISSN:2369-2960
2369-2960
DOI:10.2196/31834