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Twitter Mediated Sociopolitical Communication During the COVID-19 Pandemic Crisis in India
While Twitter has grown popular among political leaders as a means of computer-mediated mass media communication alternative, the COVID-19 pandemic required new strategies for socio-political communication to handle such a crisis. Using the case of India, which was one of the worst-hit countries and...
Autores principales: | , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
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Frontiers Media S.A.
2021
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8740330/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35002875 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.784907 |
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author | Jain, Nishtha Malviya, Preet Singh, Purnima Mukherjee, Sumitava |
author_facet | Jain, Nishtha Malviya, Preet Singh, Purnima Mukherjee, Sumitava |
author_sort | Jain, Nishtha |
collection | PubMed |
description | While Twitter has grown popular among political leaders as a means of computer-mediated mass media communication alternative, the COVID-19 pandemic required new strategies for socio-political communication to handle such a crisis. Using the case of India, which was one of the worst-hit countries and is also the world’s largest democracy, this research explicates how political leaders responded to the COVID-19 crisis on Twitter during the first wave as it was the first time such a crisis occurred. Theoretical frameworks of discursive leadership and situational crisis communication theory have been used to analyze interactions based on the usage patterns, the content of communication, the extent of usage in relation to the severity of the crisis, and the possible role of leaders’ position along with the status of their political party. The sample consisted of tweets posted by six prominent political leaders in India across the four consecutive lockdown periods from 25th March to 31st May 2020. A total of 4,158 tweets were scrapped and after filtering for retweets, the final dataset consisted of 2,809 original tweets. Exploratory data analysis, sentiment analysis, and content analysis were conducted. It was found that the tweets had an overall positive sentiment, an important crisis management strategy. Four main themes emerged: crisis management information, strengthening followers’ resilience and trust, reputation management, and leaders’ proactiveness. By focusing on such discursive aspects of crisis management, the study comprehensively highlights how political interactions on twitter integrated with politics and governance to handle COVID-19 in India. The study has implications for the fields of digital media interaction, political communication, public relations, and crisis leadership. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-8740330 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2021 |
publisher | Frontiers Media S.A. |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-87403302022-01-08 Twitter Mediated Sociopolitical Communication During the COVID-19 Pandemic Crisis in India Jain, Nishtha Malviya, Preet Singh, Purnima Mukherjee, Sumitava Front Psychol Psychology While Twitter has grown popular among political leaders as a means of computer-mediated mass media communication alternative, the COVID-19 pandemic required new strategies for socio-political communication to handle such a crisis. Using the case of India, which was one of the worst-hit countries and is also the world’s largest democracy, this research explicates how political leaders responded to the COVID-19 crisis on Twitter during the first wave as it was the first time such a crisis occurred. Theoretical frameworks of discursive leadership and situational crisis communication theory have been used to analyze interactions based on the usage patterns, the content of communication, the extent of usage in relation to the severity of the crisis, and the possible role of leaders’ position along with the status of their political party. The sample consisted of tweets posted by six prominent political leaders in India across the four consecutive lockdown periods from 25th March to 31st May 2020. A total of 4,158 tweets were scrapped and after filtering for retweets, the final dataset consisted of 2,809 original tweets. Exploratory data analysis, sentiment analysis, and content analysis were conducted. It was found that the tweets had an overall positive sentiment, an important crisis management strategy. Four main themes emerged: crisis management information, strengthening followers’ resilience and trust, reputation management, and leaders’ proactiveness. By focusing on such discursive aspects of crisis management, the study comprehensively highlights how political interactions on twitter integrated with politics and governance to handle COVID-19 in India. The study has implications for the fields of digital media interaction, political communication, public relations, and crisis leadership. Frontiers Media S.A. 2021-12-24 /pmc/articles/PMC8740330/ /pubmed/35002875 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.784907 Text en Copyright © 2021 Jain, Malviya, Singh and Mukherjee. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. |
spellingShingle | Psychology Jain, Nishtha Malviya, Preet Singh, Purnima Mukherjee, Sumitava Twitter Mediated Sociopolitical Communication During the COVID-19 Pandemic Crisis in India |
title | Twitter Mediated Sociopolitical Communication During the COVID-19 Pandemic Crisis in India |
title_full | Twitter Mediated Sociopolitical Communication During the COVID-19 Pandemic Crisis in India |
title_fullStr | Twitter Mediated Sociopolitical Communication During the COVID-19 Pandemic Crisis in India |
title_full_unstemmed | Twitter Mediated Sociopolitical Communication During the COVID-19 Pandemic Crisis in India |
title_short | Twitter Mediated Sociopolitical Communication During the COVID-19 Pandemic Crisis in India |
title_sort | twitter mediated sociopolitical communication during the covid-19 pandemic crisis in india |
topic | Psychology |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8740330/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35002875 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.784907 |
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