Chen Qiang, Min Chen, Zhang Wei, Wang Ge, Ma Xiaoyue, Evans Richard
School of Journalism and New Media, Xi'an Jiaotong University, China.
Department of Media and Communication, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China.
Comput Human Behav. 2020 Sep;110:106380. doi: 10.1016/j.chb.2020.106380. Epub 2020 Apr 12.
During times of public crises, governments must act swiftly to communicate crisis information effectively and efficiently to members of the public; failure to do so will inevitably lead citizens to become fearful, uncertain and anxious in the prevailing conditions. This pioneering study systematically investigates how Chinese central government agencies used social media to promote citizen engagement during the COVID-19 crisis. Using data scraped from 'Healthy China', an official Sina Weibo account of the National Health Commission of China, we examine how citizen engagement relates to a series of theoretically relevant factors, including media richness, dialogic loop, content type and emotional valence. Results show that media richness negatively predicts citizen engagement through government social media, but dialogic loop facilitates engagement. Information relating to the latest news about the crisis and the government's handling of the event positively affects citizen engagement through government social media. Importantly, all relationships were contingent upon the emotional valence of each Weibo post.
在公共危机时期，政府必须迅速采取行动，有效地向公众传达危机信息；否则，必然会导致公民在当前情况下变得恐惧、不确定和焦虑。这项开创性的研究系统地调查了中国中央政府机构在新冠疫情危机期间如何利用社交媒体促进公民参与。通过从中国国家卫生健康委员会官方新浪微博账号“健康中国”上抓取的数据，我们研究了公民参与度与一系列理论相关因素之间的关系，包括媒体丰富度、对话循环、内容类型和情感效价。结果表明，媒体丰富度对通过政府社交媒体实现的公民参与度有负面影响，但对话循环则促进了参与度。与危机最新消息及政府对事件处理相关的信息通过政府社交媒体对公民参与度产生积极影响。重要的是，所有关系都取决于每条微博的情感效价。
