One year into the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. had lost over a half million lives to the virus. Organizations had to shift the way they operated, requiring effective communication to help employees transition. This study examines two important time periods during the pandemic: early May, just after stay-at-home orders began to be lifted, and late November, as infection rates soared. This study quantitatively examines the role of perceived severity, organizational trust, reputation, and credibility on participants employed during the pandemic expectations of leadership at the organizational, state, and federal levels. Then, participants were interviewed to understand perceptions of leadership. Results illustrate the relationship between perceived severity of the threat and trust in leadership and uncertainty about mitigation measures from state and federal levels.
Public health experts have studied global pandemics long before the COVID-19 outbreak of 2020. Since the worldwide spread of HIV, SARS, H1N1, and Ebola among others, scholars have focused on identifying best practices for risk mitigation and reaching disparate publics to engage in appropriate risk mitigation behaviors. The 2019 measles outbreak in Washington, USA flourished in large part due to the viral spread of misinformation on social networking platforms. Due to intended openness of these platforms, antivaccination messaging became prominent, and the U.S. among other countries to have eradicated measles saw a number of outbreaks. In the U.S. in 2019, many of these occurred in Washington state. These outbreaks served as an impetus for social media platforms to reconsider their role in spreading health misinformation and its contribution to real world danger. This analysis considers open media ethics to understand social media platforms’ initial decisions to allow vaccine misinformation and the role of communication scholars and practitioners have in understanding, and acting on misinformation. Using a case study approach, this article examines online discourse about the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine, policy measures related to vaccine exemption, and social media organization formal responses in 2019 directly related to the increase in U.S. measles outbreaks. Using an open media ethics framework, findings from this study illustrate the ways in which these organizations initially intended to have an open platform for health-related discussions. Further analysis demonstrates that these organizations focused on existing terms of use to put in place protective measures that would prevent further spread of this mis- and disinformation. However, conclusions draw illustrate that placing the onus on the social media organizations alone is insufficient to prevent outbreaks such as this to occur, and as the COVID-19 pandemic began the following year, the implications of this study continue to pose questions about social media misinformation management.
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