JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

The COVID-19 pandemic altered social dynamics leading to an increased reliance on social media for information, connection, and collective sense-making.

Objective:

The study sought to understand the contrasting and transforming nature of citizen collective sense-making of a large-scale health crisis, COVID-19, across developed and developing economies.

Methods:

Following crisis communications literature, we collected longitudinal social media data from X (formerly X) across three different countries (Italy, the U.K., and Egypt). A total of nine datasets were built across the three countries corresponding to three time periods ranging from the beginning of the pandemic to the vaccination induced end of major health crisis. These distinct time periods allowed the ability to examine risk and emergency-related posts during different phases of the COVID-19 pandemic. After data filtration, we analyzed a total of n=755,215 posts. The Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) algorithm was used in order to identify key thematic topics.

Results:

Our results identified differences in collective sense-making of the pandemic depending cultural context and economic status of a country. Emerging discussions to the rise of pandemic was fragmented. In developed countries, citizen discussions were more pragmatic healthcare-driven, while citizens in our chosen developing context engaged in more religious and political debates. We conceptualize a cycle of sense-making model.

Conclusions:

Crisis communications are primarily driven by cultural, economic, and educational capital of citizens in developed and developing context. Leaders must focus on keeping citizens adequately informed while actively eliminating misinformation as part of crisis mitigation strategy.