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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...

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Autores principales: Jain, Nishtha, Malviya, Preet, Singh, Purnima, Mukherjee, Sumitava
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2021
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.
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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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