Making Sense of US Agencies’ Health Communication Efforts during COVID-19

The next speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 session is Nic DePaula, whose interest is in the association between local and regional risk levels and social media use and engagement in the US in the context of COVID-19. This is in the broader context of public health communication on social media, which is now common if unevenly distributed across agencies, due to various internal and external factors.

As public health threats rise in a given area, does social media activity by and engagement with health agencies follow? Two dynamics could be present here: there may be more activity due to the need to inform people about the risk, or less activity as agencies move to more direct channels of information. Additionally, there is a need to distinguish between different social media platforms, of course, some of which may be better suited to specific forms of health communication. Such health communication has a number of specific aspects: it contains scientific information and presents causal claims.

This project examined the posts by local, state, and federal US public health agencies on Facebook and Twitter related to COVID-19 for all of 2020, and also connected these to the party affiliation of the mayor or governor of specific towns or states; it also distinguished posts about vaccines, referencing scientific research, or presenting causal language. State and federal agencies were more active on Facebook than local agencies, while activities were more equally distributed on Twitter.

Engagement with such posts also varied widely across localities and party affiliations, as well as across the health communication languages used in posts. There seem to be no particularly consistent patterns here.