Factors Driving Citizen Engagement With Government TikTok Accounts During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Model Development and Analysis

Chen, Qiang; Chen, Min; Wei, Zhang; Ma, Xiaoyue; Evans, Richard

doi:10.2196/21463

Cited by 101 publications

(105 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…Acknowledging that there are many ways to calculate engagement (Ballesteros-Herencia, 2020) and considering the specific affordances of each platform, we used the following formula proposed by Chen et al (2021) to calculate engagement for TikTok:…”

Section: Engagementmentioning

confidence: 99%

What are political parties doing on TikTok? The Spanish case

Cervi

Lladó

2021

EPI

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TikTok, already widely used before the pandemic, boomed during the quarantine that locked down large parts of the world, reaching 2 billion downloads and 800 million monthly active users worldwide by the end of 2020. Of these 800 million users, 41% are aged between 16 and 24 years. This social network, widely known for its entertainment videos, is increasingly becoming a place for political discussion and therefore a unique opportunity for political actors to (re)connect with young people. Acknowledging that the political uses of TikTok are still understudied, this paper aims to explore whether and how Spanish political parties are including TikTok as part of their communication strategy. Through an affordance-centered content analysis of all the posts published by the five most important Spanish political parties (PP, PSOE, Ciudadanos, Podemos, and Vox), the current results show that, although all Spanish political parties have adopted this platform, their usage is unequal. From a quantitative perspective, PP was the first party to open a TikTok account, but its usage has been discontinuous; Podemos and Ciudadanos are the parties that publish the most and most constantly, while Vox has only published nine posts and the PSOE one. Nonetheless, from a qualitative perspective, Podemos and Vox generate more engagement and seem to understand and exploit TikTok’s specific affordances better. The findings allow it to be concluded that, although globally Spanish political parties do not fully exploit the platform’s affordances and tend to use it as a unilateral tool for promotion, the most engaging posts are those favoring interaction and geared toward politainment.

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Section: Engagementmentioning

confidence: 99%

What are political parties doing on TikTok? The Spanish case

Cervi

Lladó

2021

EPI

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“…According to the ELM, when individuals view COVID-19 fact-checks, released by official government social media accounts, they will refer to the corresponding central and peripheral cues to process the information, and then decide whether to share it or not. Based on the integration of existing research, this study advocates that peripheral cues include media richness [ 22 , 26 ], source credibility [ 27 , 28 ], social media capital [ 25 ], and social media strategy [ 29 ], while central cues include content theme and content importance [ 25 , 30 , 31 ]. To conclude, this study developed the theoretical framework shown in Figure 1 .…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Why Do Citizens Share COVID-19 Fact-Checks Posted by Chinese Government Social Media Accounts? The Elaboration Likelihood Model

Chen

Zhang

Chen

2021

IJERPH

Self Cite

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Widespread misinformation about COVID-19 poses a significant threat to citizens long-term health and the combating of the disease. To fight the spread of misinformation, Chinese governments have used official social media accounts to participate in fact-checking activities. This study aims to investigate why citizens share fact-checks about COVID-19 and how to promote this activity. Based on the elaboration likelihood model, we explore the effects of peripheral cues (social media capital, social media strategy, media richness, and source credibility) and central cues (content theme and content importance) on the number of shares of fact-checks posted by official Chinese Government social media accounts. In total, 820 COVID-19 fact-checks from 413 Chinese Government Sina Weibo accounts were obtained and evaluated. Results show that both peripheral and central cues play important roles in the sharing of fact-checks. For peripheral cues, social media capital and media richness significantly promote the number of shares. Compared with the push strategy, both the pull strategy and networking strategy facilitate greater fact-check sharing. Fact-checks posted by Central Government social media accounts receive more shares than local government accounts. For central cues, content importance positively predicts the number of shares. In comparison to fact-checks about the latest COVID-19 news, government actions received fewer shares, while social conditions received more shares.

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“…Another study on TikTok also proved that videos with topics of the government's handling of the situation and guidelines information promoted citizens' sharing (Q. Chen et al, 2021 ).…”

Section: Theoretical Foundations and Hypothesismentioning

confidence: 90%

“…Though some recent work has explored the influencing mechanisms of engagement among citizens during crises (Q. Chen, Min, Zhang, Ma, & Evans, 2021 ; Q. Chen et al, 2020 ; Guo, Liu, Wu, & Zhang, 2021 ; Y.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

More collaboration, less seriousness: Investigating new strategies for promoting youth engagement in government-generated videos during the COVID-19 pandemic in China

Liu

et al. 2022

Computers in Human Behavior

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Effectively engaging citizens during crises is critical for governments to disseminate timely information and help the public to adjust to the constantly changing conditions. In particular, promoting youth engagement not only enhances crisis awareness and resilience among the young generation, but also has a positive impact on youths' social participation and responsibility. With the increasing popularity of online video services, leveraging online videos to disseminate authoritative information has become a method widely adopted by government. To enhance youth awareness and engagement, two new video-based crisis communication strategies have been utilized on a popular youth-targeted video platform Bilibili in China: creating recreational videos such as animation and music videos, and collaborating with individual video-uploaders in video making. However, their impacts and results are largely unknown, which motivates our study. Guided by Entertainment Education (EE) and Collaborative Governance (CG), we report, to our best knowledge, the first systematic study on how recreational video category and government-citizen collaboration would influence youth engagement focusing on 3347 COVID-19-related government-generated videos on Bilibili. This study reveals that recreational videos successfully promote youth engagement including interaction, feedback and sharing. Collaboration with individual uploaders in video making also has a substantially positive impact on youth engagement. Through an in-depth qualitative content analysis of user-generated commentaries, we further unpacked the unique values (e.g., trust work for youth participation) as well as latent limitations (e.g., imbalanced topic distribution) of the two new strategies. We discuss how the findings enrich EE and CG theoretically, and provide practical implications to effective and engaging communication strategies during crises.

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Factors Driving Citizen Engagement With Government TikTok Accounts During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Model Development and Analysis

Cited by 101 publications

References 42 publications

What are political parties doing on TikTok? The Spanish case

What are political parties doing on TikTok? The Spanish case

Why Do Citizens Share COVID-19 Fact-Checks Posted by Chinese Government Social Media Accounts? The Elaboration Likelihood Model

More collaboration, less seriousness: Investigating new strategies for promoting youth engagement in government-generated videos during the COVID-19 pandemic in China

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