In recent times societal crises such as the coronavirus disease 2019 outbreak have given rise to a tension between formal ‘command and control’ and informal social media activated self-organising information and communication systems that are utilised for crisis management decision-making. Social media distrust affects the dissemination of disaster information as it entails shifts in media perception and participation but also changes in the way individuals and organisations make sense of information in critical situations. So far, a little considered notion in this domain is the concept of sense-giving. Originating from organisational theory, it is used to explain the mechanisms behind intentional information provision that fosters collective meaning creation. In our study, we seek to understand the potential impact of sense-giving from Twitter crisis communication generated during the Hurricane Harvey disaster event. Social network and content analyses performed with a dataset of 9,414,463 tweets yielded insights into how sense-giving occurs during a large-scale disaster event. Theoretically, we specified (1) perpetual sense-giving, which relies primarily on topical authority and frequency; as well as (2) intermittent sense-giving, which occurs from high value of message content and leverage of popularity, that is, retweets. Our findings emphasise the importance of information-rich actors in communication networks and the leverage of their influence in crises such as coronavirus disease 2019 to reduce social media distrust and facilitate sense-making.

中文翻译：

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危机时期的社交媒体：从哈维飓风中学习应对 2019 年冠状病毒病大流行

最近，2019 年冠状病毒病爆发等社会危机导致正式“指挥和控制”与非正式社交媒体激活的用于危机管理决策的自组织信息和通信系统之间出现紧张关系。社交媒体的不信任会影响灾害信息的传播，因为它会导致媒体认知和参与的转变，而且还会改变个人和组织在危急情况下理解信息的方式。到目前为止，在这个领域中一个稍微考虑过的概念是赋予的概念。它起源于组织理论，用于解释有意提供信息背后促进集体意义创造的机制。在我们的研究中，我们试图了解在飓风哈维灾难事件期间产生的 Twitter 危机沟通中的意义传递的潜在影响。使用包含 9,414,463 条推文的数据集进行的社交网络和内容分析，深入了解了在大规模灾难事件期间感知是如何发生的。理论上，我们指定了 (1) 永久意义赋予，主要依赖于话题权威和频率；以及 (2) 间歇性的感知，它产生于消息内容的高价值和流行的杠杆作用，即转推。我们的研究结果强调了通信网络中信息丰富的参与者的重要性，以及他们在 2019 年冠状病毒病等危机中的影响力，以减少社交媒体的不信任和促进意义的形成。