Unpacking the black box: How to promote citizen engagement through government social media during the COVID-19 crisis

By Qiang Chen, Chen Min, Wei Zhang, Ge Wang, Xiaoyue Ma, Richard David Evans. Computers in Human Behavior, 2020

565 citations recorded by the source corpus.

During times of public crises, governments must act swiftly to communicate crisis information effectively and efficiently to members of the public; failure to do so will inevitably lead citizens to become fearful, uncertain and anxious in the prevailing conditions. This pioneering study systematically investigates how Chinese central government agencies used social media to promote citizen engagement during the COVID-19 crisis. Using data scraped from ‘Healthy China’, an official Sina Weibo account of the National Health Commission of China, we examine how citizen engagement relates to a series of theoretically relevant factors, including media richness, dialogic loop, content type and emotional valence. Results show that media richness negatively predicts citizen engagement through government social media, but dialogic loop facilitates engagement. Information relating to the latest news about the crisis and the government's handling of the event positively affects citizen engagement through government social media. Importantly, all relationships were contingent upon the emotional valence of each Weibo post.

Subfields: Communication, Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/214e71f5c609b4b072f83efa190424b0aa420979

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Citations in the corpus

How Adolescents Use Social Media to Cope with Feelings of Loneliness and Anxiety During COVID-19 Lockdown (2020, unknown): “33,34 Hence, we predict that the inﬂuence of feelings of anxiousness on happiness is partly mediated by using social media for active coping to face the risk of the crisis (H1).”
Social Media Use for Health Purposes: Systematic Review (2021, background): “Health institutions can inform the public about common health topics such as healthy living, immunization, and smoking [7]; communicate the risk of disease outbreaks [28]; quickly provide instructions about prevention behaviors to a broad audience during disease outbreaks [29]; and share the latest ”
Impact of COVID-19 pandemic on information management research and practice: Transforming education, work and life (2020, background): “…the COVID-19 literature where studies have analysed the implications from perspectives relating to: privacy, digital inequalities, communication, automation, societal disruption, use of social media and digital education implications (Carroll & Conboy, 2020; Chen et al., 2020; Venkatesh, 2020).”