#EpiTwitter: Public Health Messaging During the COVID-19 Pandemic (Preprint)

Abstract

Effective communication is crucial during health crises, and social media has become a prominent platform for public health experts to inform and to engage with the public. At the same time, social media also platforms pseudo-experts who may promote contrarian views. Despite the significance of social media, key elements of communication such as the use of moral or emotional language and messaging strategy, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, has not been explored.

This study aims to analyze how notable public health experts (PHEs) and pseudo-experts communicated with the public during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our focus is the emotional and moral language they used in their messages across a range of pandemic issues. We also study their engagement with political elites and how the public engaged with PHEs to better understand the impact of these health experts on the public discourse.

We gathered a dataset of original tweets from 489 PHEs and 356 pseudo- experts on Twitter (now X) from January 2020 to January 2021, as well as replies to the original tweets from the PHEs. We identified the key issues that PHEs and pseudo- experts prioritized. We also determined the emotional and moral language in both the original tweets and the replies. This approach enabled us to characterize key priorities for PHEs and pseudo-experts, as well as differences in messaging strategy between these two groups. We also evaluated the influence of PHE language and strategy on the public response.

Our analyses revealed that PHEs focus on masking, healthcare, education, and vaccines, whereas pseudo-experts discuss therapeutics and lockdowns more frequently. PHEs typically used positive emotional language across all issues, expressing optimism and joy. Pseudo-experts often utilized negative emotions of pessimism and disgust, while limiting positive emotional language to origins and therapeutics. Along the dimensions of moral language, PHEs and pseudo-experts differ on care versus harm, and authority versus subversion, across different issues. Negative emotional and moral language tends to boost engagement in COVID-19 discussions, across all issues. However, the use of positive language by PHEs increases the use of positive language in the public responses. PHEs act as liberal partisans: they express more positive affect in their posts directed at liberals and more negative affect directed at conservative elites. In contrast, pseudo-experts act as conservative partisans. These results provide nuanced insights into the elements that have polarized the COVID-19 discourse.

Understanding the nature of the public response to PHE’s messages on social media is essential for refining communication strategies during health crises. Our findings emphasize the need for experts to consider the strategic use of moral and emotional language in their messages to reduce polarization and enhance public trust.