Abstract
Declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization, the Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19; SARS-CoV-2) outbreak represents the first time that an international health crisis of this level has been experienced in the digital age. Proper management of the crisis thus presents a great challenge from the point of view of communication. This study aims to determine causal configurations of different types of content that have led to a high rate of diffusion in a backchannel account during the first phase of COVID-19 spread. Firstly, we perform exploratory analysis through Google Trends and Twitter to identify possible explanatory variables of content dissemination. The variables identified were organized into two blocks (content richness and psychological content). After establishing the potential explanatory variables, two analyses were performed using different samples with Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) to find causal configurations that obtained a high rate of retweets of this backchannel Twitter account. The results reveal the importance of a combination of three factors in mal-information diffusion: emotional content, identifying content, and video. Other combinations of four factors also contributed to the success of the tweet. The two samples obtained similar results proving the effectiveness of QCA. These configurations could be useful for public management in the face of a health crisis such as COVID-19.
Presenters
Elena Cerdá MansillaStudent, Doctoral Candidate, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Madrid, Spain Sara Campo
Associate Professor, Marketing, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain Natalia Rubio
Associate Professor, Finance and Marketing Research, Autónoma University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
CORONAVIRUS, COVID19, RISK COMMUNICATION, SOCIAL MEDIA
