‘Add Twitter and Stir’: The Use of Twitter by Public Authorities in Norway and UK during the 2014-15 Ebola outbreak

Abstract

This article examines how Norwegian and UK health authorities used social media, and especially Twitter, during the 2014-15 Ebola outbreak. The microblogging service has been regarded as a promising medium for crisis communicators due to its immediacy and dialogical potential. Twitter allows communicators to respond directly to users' concerns and provide them with more precisely tailored information. However, scholars have raised questions over organizations' ability to respond to the the medium. We address these questions in two ways: 1. we examine the social media strategies adopted by the health authorities at the time of the outbreak. 2. we conduct an analysis of tweets produced by health authorities concerning the Ebola outbreak. Our analyses display some differences between UK and Norwegian authorities in terms of the strategies they adopted and the tweets they produced. However, neither country fully exploited Twitter's dialogical potential. Both countries authorities preferred a vertically integrated approach with minimal opportunities for the public to engage and little monitoring of the wider Twitter 'conversations'. We conclude that the emergence of social media has not led to a paradigm shift in crisis communication for these countries' health authorities, rather to an evolution and adaption of practices and policies.

Social Media Communication During Disease Outbreaks: Findings and Recommendations

“…Using likes/re-tweets/comments as a proxy for impact, the numbers across all three sources was consistently low in comparison with other major stories, especially those concerning celebrities; it was nevertheless broadly consistent with results from our study concerning tweets from authorities on Ebola (McInnes & Hornmoen, 2018). Ignoring the first of the four case studies as an outlier because of the extremely small size of the data set, for the remainder only a small minority were re-tweeted more than 100 times, and most were re-tweeted less than 50 times; almost all received fewer than 20 comments and most received fewer than 10; and most were liked by fewer than 20 people.…”

“…Our focus here is to provide recommendations for key communicators in health crisis management and established journalistic media regarding their use of social media during health risks such as pandemic threats. We base our recommendations on, on the one hand, analysis of how Norwegian and UK authorities had planned for social media use in health risks and crises, and then how they actually used social media (particularly Twitter) during the 2014À2015 Ebola outbreak (McInnes & Hornmoen, 2018). This analysis provided the first detailed examination of public health authorities' plans for and use of social media during a disease outbreak in these two countries.…”

Trustworthy Health-Related Tweets on Social Media in Saudi Arabia: Tweet Metadata Analysis

“…For example, in the field of health communication, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) [4] and local health departments in the United States [5] have used Twitter to communicate to people during epidemics. Another example is from the United Kingdom and Norway, where health authorities used Twitter to inform their citizens during the West African Ebola outbreak in 2014 and 2015 [6].…”

The Public Face of an Epidemic Risk: Personalization of an Ebola Outbreak in Nordic Media

“…With the resources and PR teams to ensure that their press releases are accessible to journalists, official sources can manage a risk story to keep it on the agenda (Kitzinger, 1999). Health authorities have traditionally pursued a vertical and unidirectional model of risk/crisis communication, gathering epidemiological data and using it to provide health professionals and the public with information in a coordinated and coherent way (McInnes & Hornmoen, 2018). Depending on the authorities' assessment of the risk of the spread of infection during a particular outbreak, their communication strategies are adjusted to meet public concerns and advise on precautionary measures to be taken.…”