Social Media and Policy Responses to the COVID‐19 Pandemic in Switzerland

Abstract

We study the role of social media in debates regarding two policy responses to COVID‐19 in Switzerland: face‐mask rules and contact‐tracing apps. We use a dictionary classifier to categorize 612'177 tweets by parties, politicians, and the public as well as 441'458 articles published in 76 newspapers between February and August 2020. We distinguish between “problem” (COVID‐19) and “solutions” (face masks and contact‐tracing apps) and, using a vector autoregression approach, we analyze the relationship between their salience on social and traditional media, as well as among different groups on social media. We find that overall attention to COVID‐19 was not driven by endogenous dynamics between the different actors. By contrast, the debate on face masks was led by the attentive public and by politicians, whereas parties and newspapers followed. The results illustrate how social media challenge the capacity of party and media elites to craft a consensus regarding the appropriateness of different measures as responses to a major crisis.

Young people's media use and adherence to preventive measures in the “infodemic”: Is it masked by political ideology?

“…Another aspect is that social media may restrict traditional elites from communicating policy measures. The debate on face masks on Twitter in Switzerland was found to be driven by individual politicians and the public, whereas parties and newspapers picked up Twitter debates (Gilardi et al, 2021). Non-expert voices on social media that emerged after the crisis phase of the pandemic decreased the public's trust in institutions (van Dijck and Alinejad, 2020).…”

Issue Ownership and Agenda Setting in the 2019 Swiss National Elections

“…VAR models explain the change over time of multiple variables based on their own lagged values as well as the lagged values of the other variables incuded in the model, which allows us to analyze the relationships between several variables over time. VAR models are well suited to capture the process between endogenous variables and have been used by similar studies (Barberá et al, 2019;Edwards & Wood, 1999;Gilardi et al, 2021bGilardi et al, , 2021cWood & Peake, 1998). Specifically, our model mirrors the design of Barberá et al (2019), who uses a VAR model with a set of stationary time series Y i representing the share of the daily attention each group i paid to the topics j of interest.…”

The deployment of social media by political authorities and health experts to enhance public information during the COVID-19 pandemic

“…Indeed, government communication during crises is most effective when it translates scientific and technical information (Herovic et al, 2020). Gilardi, Gessler, Kubli, and Müller (2021) further found that social media challenge the capacity of party and media elites to craft a consensus regarding the appropriateness of different measures as responses to COVID-19.…”

“…However, social media also challenge political authorities' communication, as they allow multiple stakeholders and groups to shape social and political agendas while bypassing traditional gatekeepers such as news media (Jungherr & Gayo-Avello, 2020). For instance, Gilardi et al (2021) investigated policy responses to COVID-19 promoted by Swiss political and health authorities, with a special focus on policy solutions, namely, face mask rules and contact tracing apps. The authors analysed the salience of these policy solutions to the COVID-19 problem.…”