Department of Management Information Systems, Faculty of Business Administration, Université Laval, Quebec, Canada.
Knowledge Translation Program, Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute, Unity Health Toronto, Toronto, Canada.
PLoS One. 2022 Sep 2;17(9):e0273153. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0273153. eCollection 2022.
Governments can use social media platforms such as Twitter to disseminate health information to the public, as evidenced during the COVID-19 pandemic [Pershad (2018)]. The purpose of this study is to gain a better understanding of Canadian government and public health officials' use of Twitter as a dissemination platform during the pandemic and to explore the public's engagement with and sentiment towards these messages. We examined the account data of 93 Canadian public health and government officials during the first wave of the pandemic in Canada (December 31, 2019 August 31, 2020). Our objectives were to: 1) determine the engagement rates of the public with Canadian federal and provincial/territorial governments and public health officials' Twitter posts; 2) conduct a hashtag trend analysis to explore the Canadian public's discourse related to the pandemic during this period; 3) provide insights on the public's reaction to Canadian authorities' tweets through sentiment analysis. To address these objectives, we extracted Twitter posts, replies, and associated metadata available during the study period in both English and French. Our results show that the public demonstrated increased engagement with federal officials' Twitter accounts as compared to provincial/territorial accounts. For the hashtag trends analysis of the public discourse during the first wave of the pandemic, we observed a topic shift in the Canadian public discourse over time between the period prior to the first wave and the first wave of the pandemic. Additionally, we identified 11 sentiments expressed by the public when reacting to Canadian authorities' tweets. This study illustrates the potential to leverage social media to understand public discourse during a pandemic. We suggest that routine analyses of such data by governments can provide governments and public health officials with real-time data on public sentiments during a public health emergency. These data can be used to better disseminate key messages to the public.
政府可以利用 Twitter 等社交媒体平台向公众传播健康信息，这在 COVID-19 大流行期间得到了证实[Pershad（2018）]。本研究旨在更好地了解加拿大政府和公共卫生官员在大流行期间如何将 Twitter 用作传播平台，以及探讨公众对这些信息的参与度和情绪。我们研究了加拿大公共卫生和政府官员在加拿大大流行第一波期间（2019 年 12 月 31 日至 2020 年 8 月 31 日）的 93 个 Twitter 账户数据。我们的目标是：1）确定公众对加拿大联邦和省级/地区政府以及公共卫生官员 Twitter 帖子的参与度；2）进行标签趋势分析，以探讨在此期间加拿大公众与大流行相关的讨论；3）通过情感分析提供有关公众对加拿大当局推文反应的见解。为了实现这些目标，我们提取了在研究期间以英语和法语提供的 Twitter 帖子、回复和相关元数据。我们的研究结果表明，与省级/地区账户相比，公众对联邦官员的 Twitter 账户的参与度有所提高。对于大流行第一波期间公众讨论的标签趋势分析，我们观察到在大流行前时期和大流行第一波期间，加拿大公众讨论的主题发生了转变。此外，我们确定了公众在对加拿大当局推文做出反应时表达的 11 种情绪。这项研究说明了利用社交媒体来了解大流行期间公众讨论的潜力。我们建议政府定期分析此类数据，为政府和公共卫生官员在公共卫生紧急情况下提供有关公众情绪的实时数据。这些数据可用于更好地向公众传播关键信息。
