During COVID-19, social media has played an important role for public health agencies and government stakeholders (i.e. actors) to disseminate information regarding situations, risks, and personal protective action inhibiting disease spread. However, there have been notable insufficient, incongruent, and inconsistent communications regarding the pandemic and its risks, which was especially salient at the early stages of the outbreak. Sufficiency, congruence and consistency in health risk communication have important implications for effective health safety instruction as well as critical content interpretability and recall. It also impacts individual- and community-level responses to information. This research employs text mining techniques and dynamic network analysis to investigate the actors’ risk and crisis communication on Twitter regarding message types, communication sufficiency, timeliness, congruence, consistency and coordination. We studied 13,598 pandemic-relevant tweets posted over January to April from 67 federal and state-level agencies and stakeholders in the U.S. The study annotates 16 categories of message types, analyzes their appearances and evolutions. The research then identifies inconsistencies and incongruencies on four critical topics and examines spatial disparities, timeliness, and sufficiency across actors and message types in communicating COVID-19. The network analysis also reveals increased communication coordination over time. The findings provide unprecedented insight of Twitter COVID-19 information dissemination which may help to inform public health agencies and governmental stakeholders future risk and crisis communication strategies related to global hazards in digital environments.

中文翻译：

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在 Twitter 上检查政府机构和利益相关者在 COVID-19 早期阶段的风险和危机沟通

在 COVID-19 期间，社交媒体在公共卫生机构和政府利益相关者（即参与者）传播有关情况、风险和抑制疾病传播的个人防护行动的信息方面发挥了重要作用。然而，关于这一流行病及其风险的沟通明显不足、不一致和不一致，这一点在疫情爆发的早期阶段尤其突出。健康风险沟通的充分性、一致性和一致性对于有效的健康安全指导以及关键内容的可解释性和回忆具有重要意义。它还影响个人和社区层面对信息的反应。本研究采用文本挖掘技术和动态网络分析来调查参与者在 Twitter 上的风险和危机沟通，包括消息类型、沟通充分性、及时性、一致性、一致性和协调性。我们研究了 1 月至 4 月期间美国 67 个联邦和州级机构及利益相关者发布的 13,598 条与大流行相关的推文。该研究注释了 16 类消息类型，分析了它们的外观和演变。然后，该研究确定了四个关键主题的不一致和不一致之处，并检查了传播 COVID-19 的参与者和消息类型之间的空间差异、及时性和充分性。网络分析还揭示了随着时间的推移，通信协调不断增强。这些发现为 Twitter COVID-19 信息传播提供了前所未有的见解，这可能有助于为公共卫生机构和政府利益相关者提供与数字环境中的全球危害相关的未来风险和危机沟通策略。