Dünya Sağlık Örgütü’nün Covid-19 Pandemisi Öncesi ve Sırasında Twitter Kullanımı: Tweetlerin Duygu ve Metin Analizi

Abstract

Social media as a form of mass self-communication offers a great deal of potential and opportunities for users and organizations to get, diffuse, redistribute, and monitor information and messages due to its features of accessibility, digitality, and time-space independence. Especially during a crisis, being able to harness the power of social media is an im- perative management practice not only to provide the public with accurate information but also to deter misleading claims and rumors regarding the subject. Based on this assumption, this study aims to measure and compare the overall sentiment of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) tweets before and during the coronavirus pandemic. Along with the overall senti- ment of tweets, the contents of tweets, and the WHO’s Twitter use practices before and during the pandemic were assessed in the framework of crisis management and health communication. Within the scope of our study, the WHO’s 34.673 tweets between 2018 and 2021 were examined with sentiment and textual analysis. The study also indicates the health policies be- fore and during the covid19 pandemic and crisis management tactics by analyzing and close reading the WHO’s tweets. The findings reveal that the WHO posted more tweets to inform the public and minimize infodemic while it deliberately preferred positive messages (words and sentiments) in its tweets during the pandemic.