Do news media and citizens have the same agenda on COVID-19? an empirical comparison of twitter posts

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2021.120849Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Examines Twitter posts generated by eight UK news organisations and UK citizens during April 2–8 2020.

  • Extracts a wide diversity of topics from both tweets datasets using structural topic modelling.

  • Only a small number of topics are found common, and account for different shares of all tweets.

  • Citizens focus more on expressing feelings and sharing activities while news media talk more about facts and analysis.

  • Citizens respond to breaking news more significantly on social media by posting more tweets in short time.

Abstract

This study analyses the agenda setting on social media in the COVID-19 pandemic by exploiting one of the disruptive technologies, big data analytics. Our purpose is to examine whether the agenda of news organisations matches the public agenda on social media in crisis situations, and to explore the feasibility and efficacy of applying big data analytics on social media data. To this end, we used an unsupervised machine learning approach, structural topic modelling and analysed 129,965 tweets posted by UK news media and citizens during April 2, and 8, 2020. Our study reveals a wide diversity of topics in the tweets generated by both groups and finds only a small number of topics are similar, indicating different agendas set in the pandemic. Moreover, we show that citizen tweets focused more on expressing feelings and sharing personal activities while news media tweets talked more about facts and analysis on COVID-19. In addition, our results find that citizens responded more significantly to breaking news. The findings of the study contribute to the agenda setting literature and offer valuable practical implications.

Keywords

COVID-19
Big data analytics
Social media
News media
Citizen
Agenda setting

Cited by (0)

Dr. Chunjia Han is Senior Lecturer in Business Planning and Innovation with over 10 years of experience of working with user innovation, open innovation and crowdsourcing, both as a practitioner and an academic. He has been involved in EU and UK funded projects on innovation management.

Dr. Mu Yang is Senior Lecturer in Business Strategy and Innovation with expertise in data analytics, digital innovation and user behaviour analysis. She has been working on a number of digital innovation projects supported by European Research Council, EPSRC UK and EU Horizon 2020.

Dr. Athena Piterou is Senior Lecturer in Sustainability at the University of Greenwich with expertise in innovation studies and social network analysis. She has published in the area of renewable energy. She has been involved in EU funded projects regarding small business innovation and community renewable energy. More recently she has worked on a Newton Fund project regarding networks in the creative industries.

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