Social Media Crisis Research Articles

Managing the Pandemic in Digitized Spaces: Assessing the Social Media Approaches of Scandinavian Public Health Authorities

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, health- and civil-contingency agencies—referred to here as public health authorities (PHAs)—in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark turned to social media to disseminate pandemic recommendations and information. This study explores the social media crisis management strategies employed by Scandinavian PHAs. Specifically, we apply a multiplatform research approach to assess communication objectives (Instruct, Support, Manage Reputation, and Solicit Interaction) across three social media platforms—Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter (currently known as X). Introducing a series of hypotheses based on previous scholarship, we detail the prevalence of different objectives across platforms and countries. The results indicate prominent use of reputational management, particularly on Twitter, while instructive information emerged as a highly used communication objective in Sweden and Denmark. Overall, the communicative trends remained parallel across nations, despite Sweden implementing a more relaxed crisis management strategy. The main distinction in Sweden’s approach manifested in a relatively lower emphasis on the pandemic by its PHAs compared to Denmark and Norway. National differences in crisis communication objectives indicate that Norwegian PHAs stand out in terms of using reputational management, while Sweden stands out in employing more supportive information on Instagram.

A hybrid approach of machine learning algorithms for improving accuracy of social media crisis detection

The use of social media is becoming increasingly important in our day-to-day activities. Platforms for social media are utilised on a daily basis, and it has been seen that young adults make regular use of social media, even while they are in the midst of an emergency scenario. For the purpose of communication, individuals, businesses, and governments all make use of various social media platforms. Through their efforts to establish communication with their loved ones who are residing in regions that have been impacted by disasters, a great number of people are demonstrating their profound concern for the well-being of those individuals. The individuals are looking for a variety of necessities, including food, help, pharmaceuticals, lodging, transportation, and other necessities. It is possible for telecommunication networks to experience a breakdown or become incapable of adequately accommodating a sudden spike in the number of users attempting to connect to the network during times of crisis. There is a widespread use of short messaging service (SMS) mobile text messages in the modern communication landscape. Platforms for social media websites that are accessible online have the potential to effectively regulate the flow of communication. The existence of social media networks that are technologically scalable makes it possible for this to be a feasible option. The usage of a platform that enables communication in both directions has the potential to outperform the efficiency of conventional channels that only transmit information in one direction, such as radio and television, when it comes to crisis situations. The proliferation of network technologies has resulted in an increased emphasis on the examination of the features of network components, the mitigation of the affects of these components, and the rapid restoration of operations in the event of disasters. It is possible to improve the efficiency, dependability, and participatory nature of emergency communication by making use of various social media platforms. Consequently, it is possible to make the observation that crises have become an integral part of the ecosystem of social media in the modern day.

Prioritizing Factors in Social Media Crisis Communication for Resilience Enhancement Using Analytical Hierarchy Process

Prioritizing Factors in Social Media Crisis Communication for Resilience Enhancement Using Analytical Hierarchy Process

Public Opinion Misconduct and Online Gender Violence: Exploring Chinas Social Media Crisis Beneath the Surface

Due to the rapid advancement of Internet technology, cyber violence has grown to be a massive issue driven primarily by public opinion and social events. In order to investigate the potential crisis of Chinese social media below the surface of public opinion governance, this paper focuses on several archetypal examples in which women are the subject and public opinion is out of focus, leading to ethical misconduct in public opinion. This paper used three research techniques to gather information from Chinese social media users about a specific theme: a questionnaire survey, real-time hotspot data collecting, and case comparison analysis. This paper successfully obtains a large number of data points and analyzes them. Combine this with the change in the interaction mode between the media and Internet users in the Internet+ era in recent years and the trend from one-way communication to two-way interaction, and this paper discusses the changes in the media environment and the new problems caused by them and further analyzes the practical data. Finally, it explores the problem that Chinas social media has been neglected in responding to online violence events: the traffic bias of the content reported by social media platforms has harmed netizens legal consciousness in terms of online violence, and the victims do not understand the means of safeguarding their rights according to law, while the perpetrators do not know the consequences of online violence, which makes online violence events emerge endlessly.

The Impact of Social Media Crisis on Business: BMW Ice Cream Incident as an Example

On 20 April 2023, BMW was accused of suspected anti-Chinese discrimination at Shanghai international Automobile Industry Exhibition show, mainly because the staff at BMW booth appeared to have deliberately ignored requests from Chinese people to receive free ice-cream. The aim of this paper is to investigate the effect of social media crisis on the business, by taking this BMW ice cream incident as an example. The main research methodology in this article is to use ARIMA model to predict the trend of the BMW share price excluding the effect of this incident based on stock return analysis and then compare it to the real data. The findings from this research provide evidence that predicted stock price are close to the real one, which shows that the possible short-term negative impact of BMWs reputation may appear as a result of this incident, but due to BMWs quality and product status, the negative performance will still not exist for a long-term. The main conclusion drawn from this study is social media scandal may not have lasting impact on business. Different from previous literature, this study contributes on the ARIMA analysis on the certain companys data to derive the relationship between the stock price and the social media crisis. Recommendations include: Improving social media regulation for policy makers; Establishing dedicated teams for dealing with social media information; Changing investment strategy cautiously based on social media messages.

Corporate social irresponsibility: a contingent social media crisis management perspective

PurposeToday's business world has been tarnished with numerous corporate irresponsible behaviors. It is thus of great importance for firms to carry out crisis management on the condition of corporate social irresponsibility (CSI). Taking a contingent social media crisis management perspective, the authors aim to investigate the relation between CSI and firm value while also examining the moderating effects of being known in social media and generalized favorability in social media on this relation.Design/methodology/approachThe empirical analysis conducted in the authors' research is based on a sample of 203 CSI events that occurred within publicly listed firms in China between 2011 and 2015. During the process of the authors' data collection, the authors initially verified the occurrence of CSI events in publicly listed firms by reviewing reports from reputable sources such as the 21st Century Business Herald and China Securities Journal. Subsequently, the authors collected the information pertaining to media coverage of these CSI events from the China Core Newspapers Full-text Database (CCND). Additionally, the authors obtained the remaining data from reliable sources such as Guba, the China Stock Market and Accounting Research Database (CSMAR) and the Chinese News Analytics Database (CNAD). To test the authors' hypotheses, the event study and multiple-regression analysis methods are adopted.FindingsThe authors find CSI generates a negative impact on firm value. Moreover, while being known in social media strengthens the negative relation between CSI and firm value, generalized favorability in social media weakens such relation.Research limitations/implicationsThere are two streams of limitations that present promising avenues for future studies. Theoretically, the authors explore the mechanisms of CSI affecting firm value from a contingent social media crisis management perspective. Consequently, the authors' study does not encompass other potential mechanisms that may exist in the CSI–firm value linkage. In terms of empirical analysis, three issues arise that provide opportunities for further investigation. First, the authors have not accounted for all potential factors that could influence the link between CSI and firm value. Second, the authors' data are subject to limitation since it comes from manual collection. At last, because the authors confirm the sample based on the actual CSI events of publicly listed firms in China, the authors' sample size is small.Originality/valueThe authors' findings contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the relation between CSI and firm value, as well as effective strategies for responding to CSI through the utilization of social media. Consequently, the authors' results have the potential to stimulate further research on the implications of CSI and the management of corporate crises through social media platforms.

Impact of ByteDance crisis communication strategies on different social media users

The impact of corporate crisis communication strategies on users’ attitudes across different platforms has emerged as a new focal point in crisis management. This study is rooted in Social Media Crisis Communication (SMCC) and employs the case of Trump’s sanctions on TikTok to analyze variations in the effects of ByteDance’s crisis communication strategies on different social media platforms. We initally identified five announcements that generated significant discussions on Toutiao and Weibo and collected the corresponding user comments (a total of 50,702). Subsequently, we utilized two approaches, machine learning and deep learning, to conduct sentiment classification tests on the text to identify the best-performing model. This model was then applied on the entire dataset for sentiment classification, followed by semantic network analysis based on the sentiment classification results. The results demostrated that the pre-trained ERNIE model outperformed the other tested models (F1 = 82.40%). Following the fourth crisis communication event, users on Toutiao and Weibo exhibited contrasting sentimental tendencies. Theoretically, we observed that users on different social media platforms relying on distinct information sources, expressed different sentimental responses to the same crisis. Social media users have a tendency to anthropomorphize corporate personality traits. In practical terms, we recommend that companies engage in crisis communication on multiple social media platforms and do not overlook the most influential platforms in the market.

European emergency managers on social media: institutional arrangements and guidelines

PurposeThis paper offers an empirical overview of European emergency managers' institutional arrangements and guidelines for using social media in risk and crisis communication.Design/methodology/approachThe authors collected and analysed material including publicly accessible relevant legal acts, policy documents, official guidelines, and press reports in eight European countries – Germany, Italy, Belgium, Sweden, Hungary, Finland, Norway, and Estonia. Additionally, the authors carried out 95 interviews with emergency managers in the eight countries between September 2019 and February 2020.FindingsThe authors found that emergency management institutions' social media usage is rarely centrally controlled and social media crisis communication was regulated with the same guidelines as crisis communication on traditional media. Considering this study's findings against the backdrop of existing research and practice, the authors find support for a “mixed arrangement” model by which centralised policies work in tandem with decentralised practices on an ad hoc basis.Practical implicationsComparative insights about institutional arrangements and procedural guidelines on social media crisis communication in the studied countries could inform the future policies concerning social media use in other emergency management systems.Originality/valueThis study includes novel, cross-national comparative data on the institutional arrangements and guidelines for using social media in emergency management in the context of Europe.

Evolution of online public opinions on major accidents: Implications for post-accident response based on social media network

Based on the incredible breadth and speed of information distribution within social media network, and continuous development of natural language processing techniques for sentiment and topic analyses, it is potential to access online public opinions on major accidents. An integrated framework including four-stage evolution model, lexicon-based sentiment analysis, and latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA)-based topic extraction was developed based upon social media data analysis. The explosion of Xiangshui eco-chemical industrial zone (EXEIZ) was taken as a case for investigating the evolution of online public opinions. The large accident domain (LAD)-based sentiment dictionary was established for the lexicon-based approach for sentiment determination. Effective methods (i.e., combination of short microblogs and comments into a new text, and the hybrid approach integrating perplexity with principal component analysis) were deployed for overcoming two typical shortcomings (i.e., inappropriate for short text dataset, and sensitive to the number of topics within a corpus) of the LDA-based approach for topic analysis and extraction. According to the four-stage evolution model, customized strategies and suggestions were provided for guiding and controlling online public opinions on major accidents, in order to decrease their negative impacts on the society. This enabled conducting targeted communication efforts among different stakeholders for the reduction of negative sentiments such as indignation, sadness, and threat, and the avoidance of social media crises. Although a major accident poses tangible threats to the public, it may improve their awareness for preventing from these threats. In case of appropriate measures in time, the focus tends to steer toward effective and prosocial solutions. It is helpful for sustaining and re-establishing the image of authorities, enterprises or individuals that are closely associated with the major accident.

An empirical investigation of electronic word-of-mouth: product recall and crisis response strategy in social media

ABSTRACT Product recall crises can damage reputation, result in financial losses, and generate negative word-of-mouth from customers. Appropriate response strategies on social media platforms can help companies minimise losses and save electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM). This study analysed 32,697 customer comments from Facebook to explore customer perceptions and examine the performance of different response strategies. Findings showed that the accommodative response strategy improves overall eWOM compared to the indifferent response strategy. The study provides a comprehensive understanding of the impact of social media crisis response strategies on eWOM and offers evidential managerial insights for better customer perceptions.

Officially social: Developing a social media crisis communication strategy for USGS Volcanoes during the 2018 Kīlauea eruption

The USGS Volcano Science Center has a long history of science and crisis communication about volcanoes and their eruptions. Centered mainly on websites, email notifications, traditional media, and in-person interaction in the past, our toolkit has expanded in the last decade to include social media channels. This medium has allowed us to communicate with both long-standing and new audiences in new ways. In the process, social media communication has further developed trust in USGS researchers. In particular, the nearly 4-month-long 2018 eruption of Kīlauea volcano in the State of Hawaii necessitated the rapid development of a communication strategy that more deeply incorporated web and social media (Facebook and Twitter) channels to share critical eruption information. This was the first major volcanic eruption response where the USGS used official social media accounts as a significant form of public communication and outreach. These timely and conversive interactions furthered engagement with residents and reinforced the USGS as an authoritative and approachable voice on the eruption with U.S. and international audiences. In many cases, USGS Volcanoes' social media channels were also sampled directly by media outlets looking to provide current information, particularly by local reporters and citizen journalists. This helped disseminate scientific information directly to those who needed it and removed pressure from observatory scientists to respond to media requests. In short, the conversational tone and engaged and inquisitive online audience allowed the USGS Volcanoes' social media channels to act as a virtual community meeting, which nurtured a nearly continuous educational environment for both directly affected and distant members of the public. We present the history and details of this strategy here in hopes that it will benefit volcano observatories and other official agencies and crisis communicators.

Restoring trust through transparency: Examining the effects of transparency strategies on police crisis communication in Mainland China

Employing a 2 (accepting crisis accountability vs denying crisis accountability) x 2 (high vs low information substantiality) x 2 (high vs low participation) online experiment (N = 293), this study examines how different transparency strategies influence public anger and trust in a Chinese police crisis context, offering insights on government social media crisis communication. In general, transparency is crucial for Chinese local governments, especially police agencies, in managing crises on social media. Reporting organizational crisis accountability, delivering sufficient and evidence-based messages, and enabling public discussion on social media are three transparency strategies that can help minimize public anger and rebuild public trust. Results suggest the positive effects of delivering messages in crisis situations by using transparency. Furthermore, the study points out that police organizations in China should consider the possibility of information overload and unexpectedly low overall expectations for government transparency among Chinese publics.

A Genetic Algorithm based Domain Adaptation Framework for Classification of Disaster Topic Text Tweets

The ability to post short text and media messages on Social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, etc., plays a huge role in the exchange of information following a mass emergency event like hurricane, earthquake, tsunami etc. Disaster victims, families, and other relief operation teams utilize social media to help and support one another. Despite the benefits offered by these communication media, the disaster topic related posts (posts that indicate conversations about the disaster event in the aftermath of the disaster) gets lost in the deluge of posts since there would be a surge in the amount of data that gets exchanged following a mass emergency event. This hampers the emergency relief effort, which in turn affects the delivery of useful information to the disaster victims. Research in emergency coordination via social media has received growing interest in recent years, mainly focusing on developing machine learning-based models that can separate disaster-related topic posts from non-disaster related topic posts. Of these, supervised machine learning approaches performed well when the machine learning model trained using source disaster dataset and target disaster dataset are similar. However, in the real world, it may not be feasible as different disasters have different characteristics. So, models developed using supervised machine learning approaches do not perform well in unseen disaster datasets. Therefore, domain adaptation approaches, which address the above limitation by learning classifiers from unlabeled target data in addition to source labelled data, represent a promising direction for social media crisis data classification tasks. The existing domain adaptation techniques for the classification of disaster tweets are experimented with using single disaster event dataset pairs; then, self-training is performed on the source target dataset pairs by considering the highly confident instances in subsequent iterations of training. This could be improved with better feature engineering. Thus, this research proposes a Genetic Algorithm based Domain Adaptation Framework (GADA) for the classification of disaster tweets. The proposed GADA combines the power of 1) Hybrid Feature Selection component using the Genetic Algorithm and Chi-Square Feature Evaluator for feature selection and 2) the Classifier component using Random Forest to classify disaster-related posts from noise on Twitter. The proposed framework addresses the challenge of the lack of labeled data in the target disaster event by proposing a Genetic Algorithm based approach. Experimental results on Twitter datasets corresponding to four disaster domain pair shows that the proposed framework improves the overall performance of the previous supervised approaches and significantly reduces the training time over the previous domain adaptation techniques that do not use the Genetic Algorithm (GA) for feature selection.

Listen to the noise – Demonstrating an end to end multi-platform and multilingual sentiment analysis approach

This paper demonstrates a holistic approach for conducting multi-platform and multilingual sentiment analysis of a main stream football club in the United Arab Emirates. The paper reports first iterations of the research project which anticipates to build an automated sentiment analysis system for football clubs to detect and prevent a potential social media crisis at an early stage. The article illustrates a schematic of how state of the art machine learning algorithms, methods and techniques can be put together to provide a basis for automated data collection, classification, sentiment analysis and visual reporting. The article also presents that the time-consuming and costly process of human text labelling can be effectively replaced by lexicon-based sentiment analysis. This paper reports the complete process from data collection to visual reports to discuss challenges and opportunities associated with design and development of such artefacts.

Timing and congruence effects of corporate social responsibility practices on social media crises in the tourism industry

企业社会责任实践的时机和一致性对旅游业社交媒体危机的影响研究目的企业声誉是公司的关键无形资产之一, 通常会受到社交媒体上负面帖子的影响, 例如客户投诉。迄今为止, 尚无已知研究调查社交媒体危机前和社交媒体危机后的企业社会责任实践对旅游企业声誉的影响。本研究解决了这一研究缺口。该研究的目的是调查企业社会责任实践对社交媒体危机中企业声誉的影响。本研究使用刺激-有机体-反应 (SOR) 理论检验了与社交媒体危机相关的企业社会责任实践的一致性。研究设计/方法/途径使用实验性小插图方法。受访者被随机分为四个实验组和一个对照组。通过配额抽样从香港的 435 名受访者那里收集数据是, 其中年龄和性别是控制变量。研究发现调查结果表明, 社交媒体危机恢复需要企业社会责任实践来恢复企业形象。企业社会责任实践在社交媒体危机之后立即产生影响, 而不是之前。此外, 在企业社会责任实践的规划和实施中应考虑公司的业务范围。研究原创性/价值这项研究通过使用企业社会责任实践扩展了社交媒体危机中的情境危机传播理论。 CSR 实践在危机管理中发挥着独特的作用。它可能属于可以与其他企业危机应对措施一起使用的支持类别。旅游业公司在社交媒体对内和对外增加了对可持续性的曝光。我们的研究表明, 这可以通过与旅游业一致的企业社会责任实践有效地实现。

Exploring customer concerns on service quality under the COVID-19 crisis: A social media analytics study from the retail industry

The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered a set of government policies and supermarket regulations, which affects customers' grocery shopping behaviours. However, the specific impact of COVID-19 on retailers at the customer end has not yet been addressed. Using text-mining techniques (i.e., sentiment analysis, topic modelling) and time series analysis, we analyse 161,921 tweets from leading UK supermarkets during the first COVID-19 lockdown. The results show the causes of sentiment change in each time series and how customer perception changes according to supermarkets’ response actions. Drawing on the social media crisis communication framework and Situational Crisis Communication theory, this study investigates whether responding to a crisis helps retail managers better understand their customers. The results uncover that customers experiencing certain social media interactions may evaluate attributes differently, resulting in varying levels of customer information collection, and grocery companies could benefit from engaging in social media crisis communication with customers. As new variants of COVID-19 keep appearing, emerging managerial problems put businesses at risk for the next crisis. Based on the results of text-mining analysis of consumer perceptions, this study identifies emerging topics in the UK grocery sector in the context of COVID-19 crisis communication and develop the sub-dimensions of service quality assessment into four categories: physical aspects, reliability, personal interaction, and policies. This study reveals how supermarkets could use social media data to better analyse customer behaviour during a pandemic and sustain competitiveness by upgrading their crisis strategies and service provision. It also sheds light on how future researchers can leverage the power of social media data with multiple text-mining methodologies.

" Rumor Correction in Social Media Crisis Communication: A Case of Connective Sense-breaking"

Large-scale societal crises require individuals and organizations to make sense of ambiguous situations. Nowadays, users use social media such as Twitter to seek and contribute crisis-related information. However, contradictory cues such as rumors increasingly break up their sense- and decision-making processes. We examine how sense-breaking (i.e., rumor-supporting and -correction messages) impact rumor spreading and how different user archetypes contribute to this process. Against the theory of connective action as a backdrop, we conducted a case study on the German Chemnitz 2018 riots and associated Twitter communication. With an analysis combining semi-automated content analysis and social network analysis, we identified five rumor-spreading networks. Characteristic user behavior and deduced user archetypes revealed that impeded connective action negatively impacted rumor correction. From those findings, we theoretically derive a concept that we call “connective sense-breaking”; that is, connective efforts by involved user archetypes and their supporting and correction behavior to achieve information consensus. This new perspective on rumor spreading provides IS researchers with an expedient lens for future work and helps crisis communication stakeholders such as emergency management agencies to define their role in rumor spreading and, consequently, improve their ad hoc decision-making.

How Advanced Technological Approaches Are Reshaping Sustainable Social Media Crisis Management and Communication: A Systematic Review

The end goal of technological advancement used in crisis response and recovery is to prevent, reduce or mitigate the impact of a crisis, thereby enhancing sustainable recovery. Advanced technological approaches such as social media, machine learning (ML), social network analysis (SNA), and big data are vital to a sustainable crisis management decisions and communication. This study selects 28 articles via a systematic process that focuses on ML, SNA, and related technological tools to understand how these tools are shaping crisis management and decision making. The analysis shows the significance of these tools in advancing sustainable crisis management to support decision making, information management, communication, collaboration and cooperation, location-based services, community resilience, situational awareness, and social position. Moreover, the findings noted that managing diverse outreach information and communication is increasingly essential. In addition, the study indicates why big data and language, cross-platform support, and dataset lacking are emerging concerns for sustainable crisis management. Finally, the study contributes to how advanced technological solutions effectively affect crisis response, communication, decision making, and overall crisis management.

A Multistage Analysis of Predicting Public Resilience of Impactful Social Media Crisis Communication in Flooding Emergencies

A Multistage Analysis of Predicting Public Resilience of Impactful Social Media Crisis Communication in Flooding Emergencies

“We Are Trying to Communicate the Best We Can”: Understanding Districts’ Communication on Twitter During the COVID-19 Pandemic

While educators’ uses of social media for purposes such as professional learning and networking are now well-established, our understanding of how educational institutions use social media—including to engage key stakeholders during periods of crisis—is limited. In this study, we used a public data mining research approach to examine how K–12 school districts in the United States used Twitter as a communication tool during a critical period of the COVID-19 pandemic, March-April, 2020. Through a three-step grounded theory approach of 1,357 district tweets from 492 school districts, we found that districts worked to build community and share time-sensitive announcements in alignment with social media crisis communication recommendations. Announcements were more common during the early stages of the pandemic (and were engaged more collaboratively), with community-building posts more common later on. This study demonstrates how researchers can use publicly available (social media) data to understand districts’ communication priorities and strategies during and beyond periods of crisis.