An official website of the United States government
Firms’ public communication on social media during disasters can benefit both disaster response efficiency and the perception of the corporate image. Despite its importance, limited guidelines are available to inform firms’ disaster communication strategies. The current study examines firms’ communication on social media in various disasters and how it impacts public engagement. We employ a novel natural language processing (NLP) approach, Semantic Projection with Active Retrieval (SPAR), to analyze Facebook posts made by Russell 3000 firms between 2009 and 2022 concerning various disasters. We show that firm communication can be measured based on two dimensions derived from the Competing Values Framework (CVF): internal versus external and stable versus flexible. We find that social media messages that emphasize operational continuity (internal/stable-oriented) are more popular during biological disasters. By contrast, messages that stress innovations and adaptations to disasters (external/flexible-oriented) elicit more engagement in weather-related disasters. The study offers a framework to characterize and guide firms’ design of disaster communication on social media in different disaster contexts. Our SPAR method is also available to firms to analyze their social media data and uncover the underlying patterns in communication across different contexts.
more »
« less
Internal Fractures: The Competing Logics of Social Media Platforms
Social media platforms are too often understood as monoliths with clear priorities. Instead, we analyze them as complex organizations torn between starkly different justifications of their missions. Focusing on the case of Meta, we inductively analyze the company’s public materials and identify three evaluative logics that shape the platform’s decisions: an engagement logic, a public debate logic, and a wellbeing logic. There are clear trade-offs between these logics, which often result in internal conflicts between teams and departments in charge of these different priorities. We examine recent examples showing how Meta rotates between logics in its decision-making, though the goal of engagement dominates in internal negotiations. We outline how this framework can be applied to other social media platforms such as TikTok, Reddit, and X. We discuss the ramifications of our findings for the study of online harms, exclusion, and extraction.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 2214203
- PAR ID:
- 10589663
- Publisher / Repository:
- SAGE Publishing
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Social Media + Society
- Volume:
- 10
- Issue:
- 3
- ISSN:
- 2056-3051
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
BACKGROUNDEffective communication is crucial during health crises, and social media has become a prominent platform for public health experts to inform and to engage with the public. At the same time, social media also platforms pseudo-experts who may promote contrarian views. Despite the significance of social media, key elements of communication such as the use of moral or emotional language and messaging strategy, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, has not been explored. OBJECTIVEThis study aims to analyze how notable public health experts (PHEs) and pseudo-experts communicated with the public during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our focus is the emotional and moral language they used in their messages across a range of pandemic issues. We also study their engagement with political elites and how the public engaged with PHEs to better understand the impact of these health experts on the public discourse. METHODSWe gathered a dataset of original tweets from 489 PHEs and 356 pseudo- experts on Twitter (now X) from January 2020 to January 2021, as well as replies to the original tweets from the PHEs. We identified the key issues that PHEs and pseudo- experts prioritized. We also determined the emotional and moral language in both the original tweets and the replies. This approach enabled us to characterize key priorities for PHEs and pseudo-experts, as well as differences in messaging strategy between these two groups. We also evaluated the influence of PHE language and strategy on the public response. RESULTSOur analyses revealed that PHEs focus on masking, healthcare, education, and vaccines, whereas pseudo-experts discuss therapeutics and lockdowns more frequently. PHEs typically used positive emotional language across all issues, expressing optimism and joy. Pseudo-experts often utilized negative emotions of pessimism and disgust, while limiting positive emotional language to origins and therapeutics. Along the dimensions of moral language, PHEs and pseudo-experts differ on care versus harm, and authority versus subversion, across different issues. Negative emotional and moral language tends to boost engagement in COVID-19 discussions, across all issues. However, the use of positive language by PHEs increases the use of positive language in the public responses. PHEs act as liberal partisans: they express more positive affect in their posts directed at liberals and more negative affect directed at conservative elites. In contrast, pseudo-experts act as conservative partisans. These results provide nuanced insights into the elements that have polarized the COVID-19 discourse. CONCLUSIONSUnderstanding the nature of the public response to PHE’s messages on social media is essential for refining communication strategies during health crises. Our findings emphasize the need for experts to consider the strategic use of moral and emotional language in their messages to reduce polarization and enhance public trust.more » « less
-
Social media companies wield power over their users through design, policy, and through their participation in public discourse. We set out to understand how companies leverage public relations to influence expectations of privacy and privacy-related norms. To interrogate the discourse productions of companies in relation to privacy, we examine the blogs associated with three major social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram (both owned by Facebook Inc.), and Snapchat. We analyze privacy-related posts using critical discourse analysis to demonstrate how these powerful entities construct narratives about users and their privacy expectations. We find that each of these platforms often make use of discourse about "vulnerable" identities to invoke relations of power, while at the same time, advancing interpretations and values that favor data capitalism. Finally, we discuss how these public narratives might influence the construction of users' own interpretations of appropriate privacy norms and conceptions of self. We contend that expectations of privacy and social norms are not simply artifacts of users' own needs and desires, but co-constructions that reflect the influence of social media companies themselves.more » « less
-
Transgender and nonbinary social media users experience disproportionate content removals on social media platforms, even when content does not violate platforms’ guidelines. In 2022, the Oversight Board, which oversees Meta platforms’ content moderation decisions, invited public feedback on Instagram’s removal of two trans users’ posts featuring their bare chests, introducing a unique opportunity to hear trans users’ feedback on how nudity and sexual activity policies impacted them. We conducted a qualitative analysis of 83 comments made public during the Oversight Board’s public comment process. Commenters criticized Meta’s nudity policies as enforcing a cisnormative view of gender while making it unclear how images of trans users’ bodies are moderated, enabling the disproportionate removal of trans content and limiting trans users’ ability to use Meta’s platforms. Yet there was significant divergence among commenters about how to address cisnormative moderation. Some commenters suggested that Meta clarify nudity guidelines, while others suggested that Meta overhaul them entirely, removing gendered distinctions or fundamentally reconfiguring the platform’s relationship to sexual content. We then discuss how the Oversight Board’s public comment process demonstrates the value of incorporating trans people’s feedback while developing policies related to gender and nudity, while arguing that Meta must go beyond only revising policy language by reevaluating how cisnormative values are encoded in all aspects of its content moderation systems.more » « less
-
State and federal governments use governance platforms to achieve central policy goals through distributed action at the local level. For example, California’s 2014 Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) mandates local policy actors to work together to create new groundwater management institutions and plans. We argue that governance platforms entail a principal-agent problem where local decisions may deviate from central goals. We apply this argument to SGMA implementation, where local plans may respond more to local political economic conditions rather than address the groundwater problems prioritized by the state. Using a Structured Topic Model (STM) to analyze the content of 117 basin management plans, we regress each plan’s focus on core management reform priorities on local socio-economic and social-ecological indicators expected to shape how different communities respond to state requirements. Our results suggest that the focus of local plans diverges from problem conditions on issues like environmental justice and drinking water quality. This highlights how principal-agent logics of divergent preferences and information asymmetry can affect the design and implementation of governance platforms.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051241274668
