Cutting Through the Noise: Predictors of Successful Online Message Retransmission in the First 8 Months of the COVID-19 Pandemic.

In this paper, we investigate how message construction, style, content, and the textual content of embedded images impacted message retransmission over the course of the first 8 months of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic in the United States. We analyzed a census of public communications (n = 372,466) from 704 public health agencies, state and local emergency management agencies, and elected officials posted on Twitter between January 1 and August 31, 2020, measuring message retransmission via the number of retweets (ie, a message passed on by others), an important indicator of engagement and reach. To assess content, we extended a lexicon developed from the early months of the pandemic to identify key concepts within messages, employing it to analyze both the textual content of messages themselves as well as text included within embedded images (n = 233,877), which was extracted via optical character recognition.

The First 60 Days: American Public Health Agencies' Social Media Strategies in the Emerging COVID-19 Pandemic.

In this paper, we capture, identify, and describe the patterns of longitudinal risk communication from public health communicating agencies on Twitter during the first 60 days of the response to the novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. We collected 138,546 tweets from 696 targeted accounts from February 1 to March 31, 2020, employing term frequency-inverse document frequency to identify keyword hashtags that were distinctive on each day. Our team conducted inductive content analysis to identify emergent themes that characterize shifts in public health risk communication efforts.

COVID-19: Retransmission of official communications in an emerging pandemic.

As the most visible face of health expertise to the general public, health agencies have played a central role in alerting the public to the emerging COVID-19 threat, providing guidance for protective action, motivating compliance with health directives, and combating misinformation. Social media platforms such as Twitter have been a critical tool in this process, providing a communication channel that allows both rapid dissemination of messages to the public at large and individual-level engagement. Message dissemination and amplification is a necessary precursor to reaching audiences, both online and off, as well as inspiring action.

Retweeting Risk Communication: The Role of Threat and Efficacy.

Social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook provide risk communicators with the opportunity to quickly reach their constituents at the time of an emerging infectious disease. On these platforms, messages gain exposure through message passing (called "sharing" on Facebook and "retweeting" on Twitter). This raises the question of how to optimize risk messages for diffusion across networks and, as a result, increase message exposure.