Impacts of Informational Support and Emotional Support on Public Communication Via Government-Owned Weibo Amidst Covid-19 in China
22 Pages Posted: 7 Feb 2022
Abstract
Social media-based public communication becomes an increasingly prominent channel for the government to interact with the public during crises. Most of the existing studies, however, largely focused on social media’s informational support, overlooking the emotional support that could be equally provided to the public. As such, this research took the lead to investigates both supports derived from social media-based public communication. Data were collected from 17 provincial government-owned Weibo accounts across Covid-19 in China with a Natural Language Processing based method in an econometric model to compute the strengths of informational support and emotional support strength. The findings are twofold: the emotional support is empirically confirmed in the study, which is not in lockstep with the informational support; and their impacts on public communication are dynamic rather than static across stages throughout the crisis. The study suggests incorporating both supports to develop better strategies of public communication.
Keywords: social support, public communication, social media, Covid-19
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