Twitter, Politics, and the Pandemic: An Analysis of Government and Political Communication About Covid in Scotland

Abstract

This article examines the intersection of politics, government, and health communication in the Scottish Twittersphere during the Covid-19 outbreak. It captures two phases of the pandemic: the beginning of the health crisis, and the rollout of the vaccination programme, coinciding with the emergence of the Delta variant in Scotland. A combination of thematic, quantitative content and social network analyses is employed to identify key themes emerging from the tweets of selected government and politicians' accounts, and to explore the formation of social networks communities. The thematic analysis reveals that Twitter has primarily been used for disseminating information about the virus, preventative measures, and government interventions, with limited efforts towards public engagement. Twitter communications became increasingly partisan as the pandemic progressed, with users frequently using the crisis as a political proxy. Five major clusters were detected in the Twitter network: two highly partisan and polarised clusters; a group containing numerous news media accounts reporting on the pandemic, and two clusters focusing primarily on the vaccination programme and the provision of health information, where the First Minister and the Scottish Government operate. Implications of these findings for government and political communication in health crises are discussed.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The authors agree to the following license and copyright agreement: a. Authors retain copyright in their work. b. Authors grant the European Journal of Health Communication the right of first publication online on the internet (on the publication platform HOPE of the Main Library of the University of Zurich). c. The electronic contributions on the internet are distributed under the „Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International“- License (CC BY 4.0). This license allows others to copy and redistribute the work in any medium or format, to remix, transform and build upon the material with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in the European Journal of Health Communication . These conditions are irrevocable. The full text of the license may be read under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. d. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of their work, as long as the conditions of the CC BY 4.0 License are fulfilled and initial publication in the European Journal of Health Communication is acknowledged. e. Authors grant the Editors commercial rights, using a publishing house, to produce hardcopy volumes of the journal for sale to libraries and individuals, as well as to integrate the manuscript, its title, and its abstract in databases, abstracting and indexing services, and other similar information services. f. This agreement is subject to possible legal disclosure obligations. g. This agreement is governed by Swiss law. Court of jurisdiction is Zürich.

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DOI

https://doi.org/10.47368/ejhc.2024.105

Repository URI

https://eresearch.qmu.ac.uk/handle/20.500.12289/13740/13740.pdf