Abstract
The rapid onset of COVID-19 created a desire for information about the virus and government-directed response efforts. This study explores the sharing of Twitter posts from U.S. government officials and organizations during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. This study followed two paths of investigation. First, significant differences in the retweet frequency of government sources were determined based on the source (public officials and agencies, Republican- or Democrat-led states) and differentiated by equal time periods (40 days pre- or post-pandemic declaration). The study findings show that the frequency at which government accounts were retweeted in the U.S. was significantly impacted by the pandemic period, with the post-pandemic period significantly more active as governments wrestled with unprecedented economic, policy, and societal concerns related to the crisis. A greater reliance on public officials as opposed to public agencies or departments was seen, as was a greater tendency to retweet the posts of government officials from Democrat-led states. The second path examined the content of government tweets to determine the linguistic factors which predict retweet frequency. Study results found that both positive and negative emotional language in tweets predicted the frequency of retweeting government sources, though the results varied based on the source. The study results provide insight into the government-affiliated information sources users chose to share with their networks as well as the types of language that appeal to citizens during times of crisis.
Introduction
The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in widespread societal changes, including social (distancing and restricted activities), economic (increased need for online commerce), professional (remote work), and educational (remote learning), among others. The rapid onset of societal change, coupled with the reactive nature of U.S. government responses to the pandemic, shook an already tenuous confidence in the ability of governments to ensure public safety. The uncertainty of the COVID-19 virus during the early stages of the pandemic resulted in a hunger for information, and social media was an easily accessible outlet for citizens to obtain and share pandemic-related information. As information consumers, social media users were faced with a highly polarized environment rife with politicized, questionable, or false information. In times of crisis, it is not uncommon for citizens to seek out government sources for information. Choosing which government social media sources to share with others may be driven by diverse motivations, including but not limited to familiarity, political leanings, perceived trust or credibility, or even the sentiment or linguistic content of the message. Examining posts from one example social media platform – the microblog Twitter (now X) – can provide insight into the government-affiliated information sources users chose to share (“retweet”) with their networks. Additionally, assessing the linguistic content of retweets can provide insight into types of language that appeal to citizens during times of crisis.
The following paper explores the sharing of Twitter posts from U.S. government officials and organizations during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper proceeds as follows. First, a brief overview of trust in public sector institutions and its relationship to e-government and public sector social media is provided. This overview leads to a review of public sector use of social media during crisis events, including citizens’ retweeting of public sector sources during these events. The literature review ends with a set of research questions and hypotheses which explore the public sector sources and linguistic factors which may impact retweet frequencies during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, the research study used to investigate these hypotheses is discussed.
The research study described by this paper follows two paths. First, a corpus of 998,482 U.S.- and COVID-specific retweets were investigated to uncover significant differences in the retweet frequency of U.S. government sources based on the type of source (e.g. public officials, public agencies, state-level sources with Republican leadership, state-level sources with Democratic leadership) and differentiated by the time period (40 days prior to and 40 days immediately after the World Health Organization pandemic declaration). Assessing the relative frequency at which official, pandemic-related information was shared in the early crisis stages can provide insight into which public sources citizens are inclined to share within their networks during public health crises. Second, I examined the content of these government tweets to determine the linguistic factors which predict retweet frequency. Examining the content of tweets can help to explain what linguistic factors may appeal to citizens and, therefore, encourage them to share tweets with their networks.
I find that the frequency at which government accounts were retweeted in the U.S. was significantly impacted by the pandemic period, with the post-pandemic period (March 11-April 20, 2020) being significantly more active as governments wrestled with unprecedented economic, policy, and societal concerns related to the crisis. A greater reliance on public officials as opposed to public agencies or departments was seen, as was a greater tendency to retweet the posts of government officials from Democrat-led states. These results suggest that personalities rather than organizations were more common information sources, and that the prominent role of Democrat-led states in the early response efforts may have had an impact. In terms of tweet content, the results show that the use of both positive and negative emotional language predicted the frequency of retweeting government sources, though the results varied based on the source category.
Background
Trust and E-Government
The concepts of trust and confidence in public sector institutions are often intertwined. For purposes of this study, trust – loosely defined as placing confidence in another person, organization, or other entity, based on positive assessment of intentions or behavior – can be used as a synonym for the concept of political trust. Political trust – i.e. trust in both political actors as well as political institutions to effectively govern for the benefit of its citizens – has long been a subject of political science and social science research (e.g. Abramson et al., 1999; Hamm et al., 2019; Hetherington & Rudolph, 2020; Pressgrove & Kim, 2018; Rudolph & Evans, 2005). Trust in democratic government is considered a leap of faith of sorts, in which citizens commit to being governed, with the expectation that the government will follow through on its stated mission and elected officials will be accountable to the people. Such assumptions underpin the notion of governmental legitimacy (Hardin, 2002).
The recent divisions and populist resurgence in U.S. politics may be based on a lack of trust in institutions of governance; though most visible in the post-2016 environment, trust in democratic institutions has been said to be on the wane since the 1960s (Dalton, 2017; Foster & Frieden, 2017; Hetherington, 2005). This decline in trust has been attributed to a perception that public institutions are often non-responsive to the needs and desires of the citizenry (Torcal, 2014) and is thought to impact civic participation, including voting (Abramson et al., 1999). Hetherington and Rudolph (2020) have argued that the increasing polarization of political trust along party lines has supported to political gridlock in the U.S. and may be due to increasingly diverse worldviews, a lack of warmth for political opponents, and selective evaluations of government performance. As democracy represents a social contract between government and its citizens, a decline in citizens’ trust with both politicians and political institutions is thought to threaten the long-term viability of democracy (Dalton, 2017). Others have argued that the declines in trust may be the result of an increasingly skeptical rather than cynical public, and that concerns over democratic viability are premature (Cook & Gronke, 2005).
The building and maintenance of citizens’ trust in public sector institutions offers several benefits for governance. Along with the enactment of laws, trust can provide public sector institutions with social-political legitimacy for the implementation of policy and can promote stability and reliability in operations (Park et al., 2016). Trust is essential to pushing forward policy; a lack of trust can discourage citizens from complying with laws, promote civil unrest, and discourage citizen-government cooperation (Kearns, 2004; Tolbert & Mossberger, 2006). Government-citizen cooperation can be especially important during times of crisis; for example, contact tracing efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic relied upon this cooperative relationship. Trust in government during crises is crucial to gaining citizen buy-in and ensuring policy compliance (Kritzinger et al., 2021), and research into compliance with government-related COVID-19 policies and regulations has supported this link (Devine et al., 2021). Trust in government has also previously been shown to correlate with attitudes towards vaccinations (Baumgaertner et al., 2018) as well as perceptions of the threat posed by COVID-19 (Jennings et al., 2021).
The concept of citizens’ satisfaction with the performance of public sector institutions is linked to their trust in those institutions, such that increases in satisfaction result in increased trust (Keele, 2007). The use of diverse forms of information technology and e-government is thought to result from an intentional effort to increase citizen satisfaction and trust in public sector institutions (Bannister & Connolly, 2011). E-government can be defined as the use of ICTs in government to enhance transactions, increase information dissemination and communication, and provide the potential for greater public participation (Bonson et al., 2015; Li & Feeney, 2014). By providing a more efficient, accessible means of citizen-government interaction, e-government efforts hope to build citizens’ trust in the ability of their governments to fulfill their mandates. While increased trust is a desired outcome of e-government, research has shown that mutual trust is also considered a success factor for e-government implementation (Meijer et al., 2012), though overall research into the relationship between e-government and citizen trust and satisfaction are mixed (Porumbescu, 2016). This may be due to a perceived decline in social capital due to modernization, which is said to erode both participation and trust in political institutions (Putnam, 2000). While research into the relationship between civic engagement and social capital accrued through social media is mixed, recent work by Lee (2022) suggests that virtual social ties may work to facilitate civic engagement, both individually and collectively.
Early e-government implementations have adapted over time to include more direct communication channels through interactive, Web 2.0-style tools. Social media outlets such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram act as an accessible and interactive form of government-citizen communication, overcoming traditional communication barriers such as time and distance. As communication is considered a key element of trust between social groups, public sector organizations can leverage social media communication channels to reinforce and foster trust by sharing relevant information. The general credibility of public sector organizations gives these organizations an advantage in trust-building; trust is said to develop through the perceived credibility of shared information, based on such things as expertise, evidence, benevolence, reputation, honesty, and predictability (Corritore et al., 2003; Levi & Stoker, 2000). As social media becomes an increasingly popular choice for real-time information, public sector organizations must utilize these channels effectively and leverage whatever trust capital they have accrued.
The Role of Social Media
The number of U.S. citizens accessing news through online channels has been increasing, especially through mobile devices (Mitchell et al., 2016). Social media platforms are at the forefront of this move away from traditional information sources. Social media has been defined as the digital space that facilitates the “diffusion of compelling content, dialogue creation, and communication to a broader audience” (Kapoor et al., 2018, p. 536). Social media has been seen as an accessible, engaging tool for improving information transparency, trust, legitimacy, and confidence in government (Bonson et al., 2017; Park et al., 2016; Silva et al., 2019; Song & Lee, 2016; Warren et al., 2014). Social media provides organizations with access to large numbers of geographically dispersed information consumers, providing efficient communication channels for information dissemination, collaborative problem-solving, and interactive, insightful dialogue, and is seen as an essential component of e-government (Bertot et al., 2012). Public sector organizations can leverage social media to encourage civic participation and interactive dialogue, social media can also help these organizations increase government responsiveness through commonly used information channels (Bryer, 2011).
Research into the reasons for public sector social media use, as well as realization of the participatory promise of social media is mixed. Research suggests that public sector social media use may be more often a function of perceived competition and institutional obligation rather than a desire to engage the public in collaborative policymaking or gather public feedback (Manetti et al., 2017; Reddick et al., 2017), and scant evidence exists suggesting that citizens use social media for interactive participation with their government (Haro-de-Rosario et al., 2018). The dissemination of information has therefore become the primary use of public sector social media.
Consumption of public sector social media has also been shown to influence citizen trust and satisfaction. Porumbescu (2016) found that citizens’ use of public sector social media channels was significantly related to satisfaction with and trust in public sector organizations, suggesting that communication channels with less information (e.g. social media) may offer more effectiveness in this area than channels offering more information (e.g. traditional news outlets). Social media provides far more rapid dissemination of information than traditional media channels. As a result, the real-time and interactive nature of social media allows public leaders to influence the agenda independent of traditional “mass media” such as television or newspapers (Aharony, 2012; Park et al., 2016). The perceived credibility or “ethos” of the message source – i.e. the authority or believability of the communication source, coupled with perceptions of expertise and trustworthiness – can amplify the effect of agenda-setting, framing, and priming. Evaluation of source credibility impacts perceptions of trustworthiness as well as potentially influencing behavior (Housholder & LaMarre, 2014) and is especially challenged in the digital arena, as tools like social media level the proverbial playing field for many different sources of information (Flanagin & Metzger, 2017).
Social media allows consumers of information to be selective in their sources; consequently, many users will gravitate towards information sources which are thought to be credible and align with their political or ethical concerns – so called “political consumerism” (De Zuniga et al., 2014). Prior research has shown that such consumerism can limit exposure to information from non-preferred sources, resulting in the potential for confirmation bias (Thorson, 2016). Political information is often shared on social media with people of similar political beliefs, and it is these beliefs which often determine which information is consumed or ignored (Klein & Robison, 2020). In terms of source credibility, official outlets, such as the feeds of public officials and established news organizations, are more likely to be perceived as credible (David et al., 2016; Stieglitz & Dang-Xuan, 2013). This perception of credibility among official outlets is especially important, given that the credibility of the channel is also an evaluative factor (Pressgrove & Kim, 2018); research shows that much of the public does not view social media as a credible source of information, as least for news. A 2016 study by the Pew Research Center found that only 7% of surveyed adults trusted the information they obtained from social media (Mitchell et al., 2016).
By providing a more direct contact – perceived or actual – between citizens and their government, social media channels can foster trust in ways that traditional communication channels cannot. This reduced psychological distance (i.e. how far away the stimulus appears to be) can result in a more positive perception of the message sender (Porumbescu, 2016; Trope et al., 2007). Prior research has suggested that perceived distance can be a factor in a reduction of citizens’ trust (Morgeson et al., 2011; Park et al., 2016). The influence of perceived trustworthiness and credibility can be especially important during disaster events, including pandemics, when the hunger for information – and the desire to share information – may be increased. Research has suggested that official sources are often considered more credible for disaster-related information, though concerns about timeliness lead consumers to consider both official and unofficial information sources (Liu et al., 2016).
Public Sector Social Media Use and Disaster Events
Crisis/emergency events such as pandemics and natural disasters cause severe interruptions in economic, social, and political life, and as such they facilitate increased levels of uncertainty and urgency. This context facilitates increased communication, creating knowledge gaps which must be filled with credible and timely information (Lee & Yu, 2020; Liu et al., 2016; Martinez-Rojas et al., 2018; Shklovski et al., 2008). According to the World Health Organization (2020), social media is considered an important vehicle for information transfer during times of pandemic. This importance has aligned with the increasing perception of social media as a credible information source during crisis events (Lee & Yu, 2020; Lin et al., 2016; Martinez-Rojas et al., 2018). However, perceived credibility and trust in government was further called into question by the COVID-19 pandemic, especially in the United States. Social media – with the ability to increase political polarization, and to foster false and conflicting narratives – has been called a contributing factor to declining trust in government, though research remains mixed (Klein & Robison, 2020).
Evidence of social media’s importance during crisis events was seen during the COVID-19 pandemic; Basch et al. (2020) demonstrated the ability of social media outlets such as YouTube to disseminate information necessary for mobilization and mitigation efforts, and Goldberg et al. (2020) confirmed that government response and recommendations can have a measurable impact on public health behaviors during a pandemic. However, the COVID-19 pandemic also highlighted how social media can impede public health efforts. Vaccine hesitancy and conspiratorial views of the pandemic response were said to be exacerbated by social media, especially through the hostility voiced towards the CDC, WHO, and other health organizations by President Donald Trump and other figures (Albrecht, 2022). The politicization of the pandemic was fueled in part by social media, which amplified the conservative backlash associated with some mitigation measures. This backlash and minimizing of the pandemic’s risks and effects, led by the hostile comments of President Trump, is said to have weakened the effectiveness of CDC and WHO recommendations in the U.S. (Hamilton & Safford, 2021; Stroebe et al., 2021) through both official rebukes and accusations of CDC and WHO politicization. The perceived decline in government trust and credibility is not universal, however; other areas (e.g. Western Europe) experienced increases in government trust in popularity during the pandemic (Bol et al., 2021; Oude Groeniger et al., 2021).
Research has shown the wide acceptance of social media for emergency management purposes, including but not limited to the popular microblog Twitter, now known as X (Martinez-Rojas et al., 2018). Prior studies have examined how Twitter was used to disseminate information during public health crises, such as the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa (Liang et al., 2019) and natural disasters like the 2013 Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines (David et al., 2016), as well as floods, earthquakes, and other events (e.g. Palen et al., 2010; Doan et al., 2011; Murthy & Longwell, 2013; Sutton et al., 2014; Kitazawa & Hale, 2021). User activity on Twitter is limited to 280 characters of text, though the inclusion of images, links, and short videos is common; consequently, users must choose their messages carefully to maximize impact and reach. Among public sector organizations, Twitter is most often used for the broadcasting of public information messages while other outlets (e.g. Facebook) are more often used for more interactive dialogue (Manetti et al., 2017). Besides the dissemination of information during disaster events, public sector organizations can consume the information provided by other users to enhance situational awareness. Tweets can communicate real-time reports of conditions and experiences, providing valuable information to both emergency managers and first responders (David et al., 2016; Hughes & Palen, 2009).
Twitter/X is recognized as one of the more popular social media outlets; as of 2021, approximately one-quarter of American adults used the service (Auxier & Anderson, 2021). Prior estimates suggested that there are over 150 million active daily users of Twitter and that 500 million “tweets” are posted daily (Aslam, 2020). In terms of demography, Twitter users in the U.S. tend to be younger, more educated, have higher incomes, and lean more towards the liberal end of the political spectrum (Wojcik & Hughes, 2019), though these demographics may change over time due to recent leadership and policy changes. These factors limit generalizability across the population, but Twitter provides an example of an information source commonly used by political actors to share crisis information. As a virtual public square, political discussion on Twitter by both political figures and citizens is common. Approximately one-third of tweets involve political content, and older adults (50 years or more) are more likely to post about politics than younger users (Bestvater et al., 2022). Twitter use also involves a significant amount of information re-sharing; recent research has suggested that 35% of tweets involve retweets (Chapekis & Smith, 2023) and this activity has been called the primary means of information dissemination on the platform (Lee & Yu, 2020).
Retweeting – the sharing of a tweet by one user to their audience – can help to generate awareness of information the user perceives as “important” (David et al., 2016). Reasons generally accepted for retweeting include the desire to share entertaining or useful information, to persuade others, to acknowledge agreement with tweet content, and to archive the information (Thelwall & Thelwall, 2020). Retweeting is also essential part of building a large audience, as such activity attracts other users to “follow” the source (Steele & Dumbrell, 2012). During times of crisis, original tweets of real-time conditions are common, and retweeting can help spread information to the masses. It is also common for users to retweet to share anxiety or warnings about current or future conditions. Since social media has been shown to exert influence on behavior (e.g. Margetts et al., 2015), retweeting posts about the actions of some individuals could encourage others to take similar action (Kitazawa & Hale, 2021). Prior research has shown that examining retweet patterns can be used to assess communication effectiveness and/or provide evidence of the perceived importance of content (David et al., 2016; Wang & Zhuang, 2017).
As the COVID-19 crisis formed, citizens had a growing number of information sources from which they could learn about the virus, the impacts, and mitigation efforts. Given the nature of federalism in the U.S., federal as well as state governments played a prominent role in the initial response to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. At the federal level, official information sources included the President and Vice President, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the National Institutes for Health (NIH), among others. At the state level, Governors and state-level health departments became critical sources for up-to-date information about response and mitigation efforts, especially on social media.
Prior research suggests that governments play a dominant role in crisis-related social media conversations (Kitazawa & Hale, 2021). Assessing the relative frequency at which official, pandemic-related information was shared in the early crisis stages can provide insight into which sources citizens may gravitate towards in public health crises, including specific U.S. public officials (e.g. Governors, the President) or specific public agencies (e.g. the CDC, state-level health departments). The increasing political division in the U.S. in the post-2016 era, coupled with the tendency of consumers to share information from those with whom they share beliefs, means that the party affiliation of leadership may play a role in patterns of sharing. To investigate the public sector social media sources utilized during the early onset of the pandemic, I explore the following research question:
Do significant differences in the retweet frequency exist based on the source of the tweet during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S.?
and I propose the following hypotheses:
There are significant differences in retweet frequency based on the source category (public officials or public agencies/departments) and the time period (pre- and post-pandemic).
There are significant differences in retweet frequency for state accounts based on the political party of the governor (Republican or Democrat) and the time period (pre- and post-pandemic).
The content of tweets has also been shown to impact the likelihood of retweeting. Prior research into sentiment/linguistic factors and retweeting tendencies did not focus on public sector tweets, but the findings may be informative in this context. Lee and Yu (2020), examining Twitter data during the 2013 Colorado floods, suggested that the likelihood a tweet will be retweeted is unrelated to the use of emotional language (positive or negative) while Miura et al. (2016), examining tweets during the Great East Japan Earthquake, found that tweets with higher levels of anxiety language were more likely to be retweeted than those with angry or positive emotion. As this study explores the retweeting of public sector sources, exploration of the content of retweets can provide insight into the linguistic factors which may appeal to citizens in times of crisis. Based on the prior literature review, I consider the following research question:
Does the level of emotional sentiment predict the retweet frequency of tweets from government accounts during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S.?
and I propose the following hypotheses:
The level of emotional sentiment present in tweets from government sources significantly predicts the retweet frequencies for government sources, controlling for time period (pre-pandemic or post-pandemic).
The level of emotional sentiment present in tweets significantly predicts the retweet frequencies for public official accounts, controlling for time period (pre-pandemic or post-pandemic).
The level of emotional sentiment present in tweets significantly predicts the retweet frequencies for public agency accounts, controlling for time period (pre-pandemic or post-pandemic).
The level of emotional sentiment present in tweets significantly predicts the retweet frequencies for state government sources in states with Republican governors, controlling for time period (pre-pandemic or post-pandemic).
The level of emotional sentiment present in tweets significantly predicts the retweet frequencies for state government sources in states with Democratic governors, controlling for time period (pre-pandemic or post-pandemic).
Methodology
Tweets were collected for the period February 01, 2020, through April 20, 2020. As March 11, 2020, marks the date of the WHO pandemic declaration, this dataset provides insight into retweeting patterns before and after that declaration in equal proportions. I used custom Python scripts to collect tweets based on tweet IDs obtained from the GeoCoV19 dataset from CrisisNLP (https://crisisnlp.qcri.org/covid19). The GeoCoV19 dataset (Qazi et al., 2020) contains over 500 million IDs of tweets containing one or more of 800 possible COVID-19 related hashtags and keywords. Custom scripts were used to filter the tweets for English-language and U.S.-specific tweets, where U.S.-specific is defined as source location as found in the GeoCov19 metadata for each tweet. This filtering resulted in a reduced dataset of 63,036,772 tweets.
List of Twitter Handles for Data Collection.
aAccount was excluded from analysis due to a lack of shared tweets.
As March 11, 2020, marks the date of the WHO pandemic declaration, this dataset provides insight into U.S. public retweeting patterns immediately before and after that declaration in equal proportions. The final dataset was organized by day, and a dichotomous variable was used to indicate the time period from February 01 through March 11 (pre-pandemic) and the time period from March 12 through April 20 (post-pandemic). Total retweet counts were organized as overall counts per day, by level (federal-level, state-level), and by role (accounts of public officials, and accounts of public agencies/departments). Total retweet counts for state-level sources (state-level accounts of public officials, and accounts of public agencies/departments) were also filtered based on the party affiliation of the governor (Republican or Democrat) during this time period. Among the 50 states, there were 26 Republican and 24 Democrat governors in 2020.
Data analysis followed three paths. Preliminary t-test analyses were used to identify significant differences in overall retweet frequencies as well as for the five source categories (combined federal and state sources, public officials, public agencies, states with Republican governors, states with Democrat governors). Next, I conducted a set of 2 (time period, pre-pandemic vs. post-pandemic) x 2 (source of tweet) mixed Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) procedures to test hypotheses H1 and H2. Finally, I performed a series of multiple regressions to test hypotheses H3-H7. The independent variables for hypotheses H3-H7 were operationalized from measures produced by the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software. LIWC provides automated analysis of text-based data for persistent themes and constructs, including pre-defined affective, cognitive, structural, and behavioral indicators. LIWC generates a numeric measure for over 80 linguistic categories (for a full description of the categories, see Pennebaker et al., 2015). Prior research has shown the validity and reliability of LIWC measures across different contexts and languages (e.g. Alpers et al., 2005; Bantum & Owen, 2009; Tausczik & Pennebaker, 2010) and for correlating linguistic style with psychological, emotional, and other factors (e.g. Wang et al., 2016; Chandra Guntuku et al., 2019).
For this study, I analyzed the retweets on each day using the LIWC software. Emotional sentiment was operationalized as four separate LIWC categories/measures: positive emotion, anxiety, anger, and sadness. Each of these words has an associated dictionary of words; for example, the dictionary for “anger” includes words such as “hate” or “annoyed”, while the dictionary for “sadness” includes words like “crying” or “grief” (Pennebaker et al., 2015). LIWC reports scores as a percentage of the total words in the text that fall in the specific dictionary. The choice of the positive emotion, anxiety, anger, and sadness measures for this study was influenced by prior uses of this construct in the literature (e.g. Lee & Yu, 2020). I also included a dichotomous variable for time period (pre-pandemic vs. post-pandemic) as a controlling factor in the regression analyses.
Results
Descriptive Statistics.
As could be expected, the preliminary t-test results show that the frequencies at which COVID-related tweets were shared from government accounts significantly increased in the post-pandemic period. Social media has become an important tool for government organizations to collect and disseminate information during a crisis, providing a real-time mechanism for brief, focused government-to-citizen communication. The increase in retweets from these accounts can be expected to increase in the post-pandemic period, as prior research has shown that the psychological impact of such crises – e.g. anger or nervousness – leads people to share crisis information (Chen & Sakamoto, 2013). This increase is reasonably thought to be a function of uncertainty and the resultant thirst for information in the presence of an unprecedented public health crisis. The significant increase in post-pandemic sharing of government tweets was seen for state-level accounts (regardless of the Governor’s political affiliation) as well as the accounts of public officials and public agencies. The effect sizes in all cases were very large, suggesting a concerted effort at spreading government-sourced information during the early days of the pandemic.
ANOVA Results: Group Differences in Retweet Frequency
Examining differences between various public sector groups, including groups based on roles (public officials or public agencies) and the political affiliation of state-level leadership can shed light on which sources citizens gravitate towards during times of crisis.
Hypothesis H1: Public officials and Public Agencies/Departments
Estimated Marginal Means for Time and Source (Officials or Agencies).
Figure 1 describes the significant interaction results. During both time periods, Twitter users retweeted the posts of public officials in greater numbers than posts from public agencies. However, this difference was much more pronounced in the post-pandemic period, suggesting that users looked more towards public officials (e.g. the President, Governors, and State Health Secretaries) for COVID-related information rather than public agencies (e.g. the CDC, state health departments). The differential between retweets from public official and public agency accounts was much more pronounced in the post-pandemic period, despite a more than threefold increase in the number of retweets from agency accounts. This finding suggests that Twitter users felt more compelled to share information from the accounts of public leaders, despite the content-expert status often afforded to federal- and state-level health agencies (e.g. CDC, NIH, state-level health departments). This may be due to the front-and-center nature of public officials; in the absence of other compelling factors, people will gravitate towards information sources with which they are familiar. In seeking out information, preference appears to have been placed towards public officials rather than public agencies. The politicization of the pandemic – and the associated distrust in scientific experts and related government agencies – are factors to consider in this result. Future research should explore in more depth the role that public personality and position play in citizens’ decisions to retweet information. Interaction between time period and source type (Officials/Agencies).
Hypothesis H2: State-Level Accounts and Gubernatorial Political Affiliation
Estimated Marginal Means for Time and State-Level Source (Affiliation).
Interaction between time period and state-level source type (Affiliation).
The significant differences between Republican-led and Democratic-led states may be a function of the more media-prominent role that Democratic Governors like Andrew Cuomo (NY) and Gavin Newsome (CA) held in the early stages of the pandemic, as well as the potential hesitancy of Republican governors considering President Trump’s slow response strategy. The increasing conservative hostility towards the CDC and pandemic mitigation measures may have also been a factor, coupled with a Twitter population which tends to skew younger, more educated, and more liberal. Future research should consider how such things as the size of the Governor’s social media following and the strength of opposition within the state impact the frequency of retweeting state-level sources, as well as whether the demography of the platform impacts perceptions of government sources as credible or trustworthy.
However, it is important to note that users retweeted substantially more tweets from all state-level sources than from federal-level sources once the pandemic was declared. To be exact, the number of retweets from state-level sources post-pandemic increased by 7.56 times from pre-pandemic levels. While this overall increase is at least partially due to an increased number of COVID-related tweets coming from these state-level sources, the growth of state-level retweets is indicative of the nature of the early pandemic response effort. States were widely seen as taking the lead in the pandemic response through economic shutdowns and orders for masking, sheltering in place, and other mitigation efforts. This state-level leadership, coupled with the diversity of state response strategies, would necessarily influence the decision for Twitter users to share these tweets to inform members of their network.
Regression Results: Predicting Retweet Frequencies
The group differences point out which groups are more likely to be retweeted (and when) but examining the content of tweets can help to explain what linguistic factors may appeal to citizens and, therefore, encourage them to share tweets with their networks. To test hypotheses H3-H7, I conducted five multiple regression analyses. The regression results found that both the pandemic period and the use of emotion-related language predicted the frequency of retweets from public sector accounts, though the effects differed between the different groups.
Hypothesis H3: Emotional Sentiment and Government Sources
The first regression analysis was conducted to determine which of the four LIWC factors predicts the retweet frequencies for government sources, controlling for the time period (pre-pandemic vs. post-pandemic). Preliminary data screening for outliers led to the removal of four cases. Pearson correlations were examined to tested to assess any significant correlations between the four LIWC factors. The results found only small to moderate correlations between factors, so a decision was made to retain all factors for the regression model. The results found that the model significantly predicted the retweet frequencies for government sources, R 2 = 0.434, R 2 adj = 0.394, F(5, 70) = 10.750, p < .001, supporting Hypothesis H3. The model accounted for 39.4% of the outcome variance.
Regression Coefficients (Retweets of Public Sector Sources).
R2 = 0.434, R2adj = 0.394, F(5 70) = 10.750, p < .001.
***p < .01; **p < .05; *p < .10.
Hypothesis H4: Emotional Sentiment and Public Official Accounts
Regression Coefficients (Retweets of Public Officials).
R2 = 0.329, R2adj = 0.283, F(5, 72) = 7.076, p < .001.
***p < .01; **p < .05; *p < .10.
Hypothesis H5: Emotional Sentiment and Public Agency Accounts
Regression Coefficients (Retweets of Public Agency/Department Sources).
R2 = 0.473, R2adj = 0.436, F(5, 70) = 12.574, p < .001.
***p < .01; **p < .05; *p < .10.
Hypothesis H6: Emotional Sentiment and Republican-Led State Accounts
Regression Coefficients (Retweets of State-Level Sources for Republican-Governor States).
R2 = 0.545, R2adj = 0.510, F(5, 64) = 15.362, p < .001.
p < .01; **p < .05; *p < .10.
Hypothesis H7: Emotional Sentiment and Democratic-Led State Accounts
Regression Coefficients (Retweets of State-Level Sources for Democratic-Governor States).
R2 = 0.632, R2adj = 0.611, F(4, 71) = 30.476, p < .001.
p < .01; **p < .05; *p < .10.
Conclusion
The uncertainty brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a hunger for information among citizens. Social media is an easily accessible outlet for citizens to obtain and share (sometimes questionable) information, especially from information sources thought to be trustworthy or credible – including but not limited to public sector sources. This study examining the retweeting of posts from Twitter provided insight into the public sector sources users chose to share during the early stages of the crisis. As could be expected, the post-pandemic period (March 11-April 20, 2020) was especially active as federal and state governments wrestled with their responses to the emerging crisis and citizens struggled to adapt to the rapid and unprecedented changes to their daily routines. The significant group differences reflected a greater tendency to share COVID-related content from public officials as opposed to public agencies or departments. This result reinforces the idea that personalities rather than organizations were the more sought-after information sources, perhaps due to the widespread media coverage of certain public actors involved in the response (e.g. New York Governor Cuomo, President Trump). A similar effect can be seen in that Twitter users were significantly more likely to retweet public officials and agencies from Democrat-led states; as many of these states were at the forefront of the response efforts, it makes sense that these information sources would be shared. The proactive responses, combined with the demographics of Twitter users and the response hesitancy and contempt shown by some Republican politicians, promoted an environment whereby more Democrat-leaning sources would be more attractive for COVID-related content.
Analysis of the tweet content provided a diverse picture of the relationship between emotional language and retweet frequency. The regression results for the use of emotion-related language suggest that while positive language use predicts retweet frequency for all government sources, sadness, anxiety, and anger were also significant predictors for some groups. While at least some language falling in these categories is inevitable when talking about a public health crisis, the potential for using this language to promote negative outcomes (e.g. scapegoating, division) exists. Future research should explore the topics and linguistic features of government social media posts more in-depth, especially in combination with explorations of contextual (e.g. level of political opposition) and temporal factors which may impact use of the medium.
Additional research beyond the focus on U.S.- and English-specific tweets – i.e. a more inclusive and international sample, including from other social media platforms – may also allow for more generalizable findings. Future research may also seek to determine whether the findings of this study extend into other platforms. As previously mentioned, Twitter is commonly used by political actors to share crisis information, and retweets – information re-sharing within networks – is one of the more common platform activities. Twitter is not unique, as other social media platforms allow users to share (and re-share) information. Given the diversity of platforms used by governments, public officials, and citizens during this period, information from one social media platform commonly finds its way onto others. Exploring the retweeting patterns of government accounts on Twitter (now X) may therefore be representative of the information shared on social media during the onset of COVID-19; however, additional research would be necessary to uncover whether the findings of this study extend beyond a single platform.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
