Official Information on Twitter during the Pandemic in Spain

Abstract

This article shows the use of Twitter that the main official spokespersons of the Spanish government made during the first weeks of the pandemic, with the aim of analyzing how government health campaigns were managed during the exceptional period of the state of alarm to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic and whether the instructions in terms of institutional management of communication to combat the infodemic set by the World Health Organization (WHO) were followed. This research considers the diffusion of official information in different phases of the first three months of the government’s action (102 days) from the outbreak of COVID-19 in Spain (March 2020) and how it developed its approach to crisis communication using the Twitter accounts of the President of the Spanish government (@sanchezcastejon), front-line leaders and the Ministry of Health (@sanidadgob), the main public institution responsible for health crisis management with the hashtags #EsteVirusLoParamosUnidos and #COVID-19. The results of a sample of 750 tweets reveal how the official sources used a model of online communication with a particular emphasis on informative and motivational tweets from leaders aimed at audiences (media and the general public). At the same time, there is also an instructive function about the pandemic towards audiences (general public and companies), with the Ministry and health authorities playing a key, proactive role in an attempt to achieve informative transparency to mitigate the pandemic and infodemic.