Digital citizens’ feelings in national #Covid 19 campaigns in Spain

Abstract

Background In 2020 Spain launched an official campaign, #EsteVirusLoParamosUnidos, aimed at uniting the entire country through citizen cooperation, in order to combat Covid-19. The objective of this research has been to analyse how this Twitter campaign revealed the feelings expressed by Spanish citizens. Methods The research is based on a composite design that triangulates, from a theoretical model, a quantitative analysis and a qualitative analysis. Results Of the 7,357 tweets in the sample, 72.32% were found to be retweets. Four content families were extracted which relate to politics, education, messages to society and the defence of occupational groups. The feelings expressed ranged from those of unity, admiration and support to those of discontent and criticism of issues regarding the health situation. Conclusions The development of networked socio-political and technical measures, which enabled citizen participation, facilitated the development of new patterns of interaction between national or regional governments and digital citizens. This increased citizens’ possibilities of influencing the public agenda and, therefore, strengthening citizen engagement regarding specific situations.

Understanding COVID: Collaborative Government Campaign for Citizen Digital Health Literacy in the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…Most countries in the world disseminated information and prevention campaigns for COVID-19 through official statements and other mass media. In Spain, the national government developed four population campaigns exclusively on the internet in order to fight against the spread of the pandemic, reinforcing individual security measures and community action [ 38 , 39 ]. The campaigns were disseminated via Twitter, and the analysis of their design and implementation allowed some interesting conclusions to be drawn.…”

“…Although the campaigns promoted the dissemination of health security measures, they did not serve to encourage debate and interaction between governments/public institutions and citizens [ 39 ]. In addition, the campaigns generated polar responses, with very positive visions that were faced with other very negative ones, which did not help to improve union and community action [ 38 ]. However, a similar campaign carried out in Italy through Facebook, the #I-am-engaged campaign, was built around a community perspective, with a participatory process that favored co-creation among peers.…”

How did sustainable Spanish and Italian brands communicate COVID-19 on social media?

“…Due to this increased interaction on social media, there was an impressive increase in comments, news and hoaxes about the pandemic. On the positive side, governments and public health agencies have made extensive use of launching campaigns to raise awareness of risks and disseminate protective actions and protocols (Wang et al , 2020; Malik et al , 2021; Santoveña-Casal et al , 2021). On the negative side, the fear of the unknown along with the lockdown resulting from COVID-19 created a breeding ground for strong misinformation, giving rise to many conspiracy theories.…”

“…This increase in the use of social media by companies during the pandemic motivated us to carry out the current study (Wong et al , 2021). This new scenario involves the emergence of new patterns of interaction among governments, citizens and technology (Santoveña-Casal et al , 2021), specifically between companies and citizens. Therefore, companies can support public health policies by increasing citizenship awareness, and these kinds of communication campaigns can also be understood as a corporate social responsibility (CSR) activity (Xie and Wang, 2022) included within the framework of health communication (Afful-Dadzie et al , 2023).…”

Advantageous comparison: using Twitter responses to understand similarities between cybercriminals (“Yahoo Boys”) and politicians (“Yahoo men”)

“…The article undertakes a qualitative analysis of tweets of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), an elite law enforcement agency, to understand public attitudes, sentiments, and expressions concerning the prosecutions of Nigerian cybercriminals. Studies about multiple social contexts such as Colombia ( Correa and Camargo, 2017 ), Belgium ( Kurten and Beullens, 2021 ), Japan ( Mason, 2019 ), Finland ( Koiranen et al., 2019 ), India ( Ahmed et al., 2018 ), the United States ( Lim and Lee-Won, 2017 ), Spain ( Santoveña-Casal et al., 2021 ), Thailand ( Leelawat et al., 2021 ), and the United Kingdom ( Asher et al., 2019 ) have shown how Twitter served as a lens through which the seemingly disorganized social issues are organized as connected parts of a whole.…”