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We used structural topic modeling to analyze over 800,000 German tweets about COVID-19 to answer the questions: What patterns emerge in tweets as a response to a health crisis? And how do topics discussed change over time? The study leans on the goals associated with the health information seeking (GAINS) model, discerning whether a post aims at tackling and eliminating the problem (i.e., problem-focused) or managing the emotions (i.e., emotion-focused); whether it strives to maximize positive outcomes (promotion focus) or to minimize negative outcomes (prevention focus). The findings indicate four clusters salient in public reactions: 1) “Understanding” (problem-promotion); 2) “Action planning” (problem-prevention); 3) “Hope” (emotion-promotion) and 4) “Reassurance” (emotion-prevention). Public communication is volatile over time, and a shift is evidenced from self-centered to community-centered topics within 4.5 weeks. Our study illustrates social media text mining's potential to quickly and efficiently extract public opinions and reactions. Monitoring fears and trending topics enable policymakers to rapidly respond to deviant behavior, like resistive attitudes toward containment measures or deteriorating physical health. Healthcare workers can use the insights to provide mental health services for battling anxiety or extensive loneliness from staying home.
Research into the effects of social media on well-being often distinguishes “active” and “passive” use, with passive use supposedly more harmful to well-being (i.e., the passive use hypothesis). Recently, several studies and reviews have begun to question this hypothesis and its conceptual basis, the active/passive dichotomy. As this dichotomy has become a staple of social media research but evidence challenging its validity is mounting, a comprehensive debate on its pros, cons, and potential future is needed. This adversarial review brings together two voices – one more supportive, and the other more critical – toward the active/passive model. In constructive dialogue, we summarize and contrast our two opposing positions: The first position argues that the active/passive dichotomy is a useful framework because it adequately describes how and why passive use is (more) harmful for well-being. The second position challenges the validity of the dichotomy and the passive use hypothesis specifically. Arguments are presented alongside (a) the empirical basis, (b) conceptualization, and (c) operationalization of active and passive use, with particular focus on the passive use hypothesis. Rather than offering a conciliatory summary of the status quo, the goal of this review is to carve out key points of friction in the literature on the effects of social media through fruitful debate. We summarize our main agreements and unresolved disagreements on the merits and shortcomings of the active/passive dichotomy. In doing so, this review paves the way for researchers to decide whether and how they want to continue applying this lens in their future work.
Purpose
Given inconsistent results in prior studies, this paper applies the dual process theory to investigate what social media messages yield audience engagement during a political event. It tests how affective cues (emotional valence, intensity and collective self-representation) and cognitive cues (insight, causation, certainty and discrepancy) contribute to public engagement.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors created a dataset of more than three million tweets during the 2020 United States (US) presidential elections. Affective and cognitive cues were assessed via sentiment analysis. The hypotheses were tested in negative binomial regressions. The authors also scrutinized a subsample of far-famed Twitter users. The final dataset, scraping code, preprocessing and analysis are available in an open repository.
Findings
The authors found the prominence of both affective and cognitive cues. For the overall sample, negativity bias was registered, and the tweet’s emotionality was negatively related to engagement. In contrast, in the sub-sample of tweets from famous users, emotionally charged content produced higher engagement. The role of sentiment decreases when the number of followers grows and ultimately becomes insignificant for Twitter participants with many followers. Collective self-representation (“we-talk”) is consistently associated with more likes, comments and retweets in the overall sample and subsamples.
Originality/value
The authors expand the dominating one-sided perspective to social media message processing focused on the peripheral route and hence affective cues. Leaning on the dual process theory, the authors shed light on the effectiveness of both affective (peripheral route) and cognitive (central route) cues on information appeal and dissemination on Twitter during a political event. The popularity of the tweet’s author moderates these relationships.
Strategic social media use positively influences organizational goals such as the long-term accrual of social capital, and thus social media information governance has become an increasingly important organizational objective. It is particularly important for humanitarian nongovernmental organizations (HNGOs), whose work relies on accurate and timely information regarding socially altruistic behavior (donations, volunteerism, etc.). Despite the potential of social media for increasing social capital, tensions in governing social media information across an organization's different operational levels (regional, intermediate, and national) pose a difficult challenge. Prominent governance frameworks offer little guidance, as their focus on control and incremental policymaking is largely incompatible with the processes, roles, standards, and metrics needed for managing self-governing social media. This study offers a notion of dynamic and co-evolutionary process management of multi-level organizations as a means of conceptualizing social media information governance for the accrual of organizational social capital. Based on interviews with members of HNGOs, this study reveals tensions that emerge within eight focus areas of accruing social capital in multi-level organizations, explains how dynamic process management can ease those tensions, and proposes corresponding strategy recommendations.