Crisis communication during the Covid-19 pandemic and its impact on citizens´ feelings

Abstract

This paper investigates how government communications on Twitter®, in the context of the Covid-19 crisis, has produced different feelings among citizens. This type of interaction has effects on the perception of rulers and compliance with restrictions. Using R's tidytext package, a total of 28,344 Covid-related tweets were analyzed between January 2020 and March 2021 from ten user profiles on Twitter® (the mayors and Town Halls of Barranquilla, Bogotá, Cali, and Medellín, the President, and the presidency). The study seeks to contribute to the field of government communications during the Covid-19 crisis and the feelings they arouse toward citizen and government interactions during the study period.

government crisis communications; natural language processing; Covid-19 pandemic; Twitter®; Colombia