Abstract

BACKGROUNDEffective communication is crucial during health crises, and social media has become a prominent platform for public health experts to inform and to engage with the public. At the same time, social media also platforms pseudo-experts who may promote contrarian views. Despite the significance of social media, key elements of communication such as the use of moral or emotional language and messaging strategy, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, has not been explored. OBJECTIVEThis study aims to analyze how notable public health experts (PHEs) and pseudo-experts communicated with the public during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our focus is the emotional and moral language they used in their messages across a range of pandemic issues. We also study their engagement with political elites and how the public engaged with PHEs to better understand the impact of these health experts on the public discourse. METHODSWe gathered a dataset of original tweets from 489 PHEs and 356 pseudo- experts on Twitter (now X) from January 2020 to January 2021, as well as replies to the original tweets from the PHEs. We identified the key issues that PHEs and pseudo- experts prioritized. We also determined the emotional and moral language in both the original tweets and the replies. This approach enabled us to characterize key priorities for PHEs and pseudo-experts, as well as differences in messaging strategy between these two groups. We also evaluated the influence of PHE language and strategy on the public response. RESULTSOur analyses revealed that PHEs focus on masking, healthcare, education, and …

Metadata

publication

JMIR Preprints, 2024

year

2024

publication date

2024/7

authors

Ashwin Shreyas Mohan_Rao, Nazanin Sabri, Siyi Guo, Louiqa Raschid, Kristina Lerman

link

https://par.nsf.gov/biblio/10523070

publisher

JMIR Preprints