Digital Communication During Crisis: The Example of The World Health Organization and The Ministries of Health in The Covid-19 Global Crisis

Abstract

This study focuses on examining the crisis communication efforts of public institutions, specifically health ministries, over social media during the Covid 19 period, in terms of word use and sentiment analysis. In the study, content and sentiment analysis was carried out by text mining method, focusing on the Twitter posts of the ministries of health of the countries with the highest number of cases in the world, especially on the social media pages used within the framework of crisis communication. According to the results of the study, it has been found that the health ministries of the countries have different crisis communication orientations and integrate with different words and emotions during the Covid global crisis. According to the results, while the US Ministry of Health and Human Services came to the fore as the ministry with the most content consistency with the World Health Organization, it is found that the Ministry of Health of the Republic of Turkey approached the crisis with a broad perspective, and the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare of India carried out activities for perception management. When the results were examined in terms of sentiment analysis, it was found that the sentiments in the posts of the health ministries of the countries differed significantly from each other.