Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Oct 17, 2021
Date Accepted: Feb 8, 2022
Date Submitted to PubMed: Mar 11, 2022
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
World Health Organization’s Agenda For COVID-19 and Its Effects: A Network Agenda-Setting Study with Twitter Users
ABSTRACT
Background:
Rarely any single study has investigated the role of public health organizations, such as the World Health Organization (WHO), in setting a public health agenda on social media during public health crises. More specifically, no study has examined WHO’s agenda on different types of users on social media.
Objective:
This study (a) identified the topics (i.e., issues) presented in WHO’s tweets (i.e., agenda) regarding the COVID-29 pandemic on Twitter from; (b) examined the effect of WHO’s COVID-19 related agenda on 7.5 million of its followers on Twitter, specifically six types (i.e., categories) of Twitter users, including “healthcare professionals”, “academics”, “politicians”, “print and electronic media”, “legal professionals,” and the “private sector”; and (c) investigated the effect of WHO’s followers on Twitter on WHO’s agenda regarding COVID-19.
Methods:
This study applied content analysis to 7,090 tweets posted by WHO from January 1 to July 31, 2020 to find WHO’s agenda regarding COVID-19 in that period. This study also employed Quadratic Assignment Procedure (QAP) and QAP regression to investigate the relationship between the agenda network of WHO and agenda network of its followers on Twitter. To do this, a network (matrix) of the seven issues was created for WHO and each of the six Twitter user categories. Additionally, 98 Granger causality tests were performed to determine which issue in WHO’s agenda influenced the corresponding issue in Twitter user categories.
Results:
The content analysis indicated that seven issues constituted WHO’s agenda about COVID-19, including “prevention,” “solidarity,” “charity,” “teamwork,” “ill-effect,” “surveillance,” and “credibility.” QAP showed significant and strong correlations between WHO’s agenda network (i.e., network of the seven issues) and the agenda network of each Twitter user category. The strong correlations indicate that WHO has a network agenda-setting effect on its followers on Twitter. Results also showed that WHO influenced “surveillance” in politics and print and electronic media, “ill-effect” in print and electronic media, and “credibility” in academics and private sector. Additionally, it was found that the six Twitter user categories influenced some issues in WHO’s agenda such as “charity”, “prevention”, “surveillance”, and “ill-effect”.
Conclusions:
This study extends theorizing on agenda-setting by providing evidence that (a) agenda–setting effects vary by Twitter user category and issue type, and (b) while network agenda-setting is a “one-way” model, there is “two-way” effects of agenda-setting on social media: both WHO and Twitter user categories affected each other’s agenda on Twitter.
Citation
