Promoting Public Engagement during the COVID-19 Crisis: How Effective Is the Wuhan Local Government’s Information Release?

Abstract

During times of public crises (such as COVID-19), governments must act swiftly to release crisis information effectively and efficiently to the public. This paper provides a general overview of the way that the Wuhan local government use Weibo as a channel to engage with their citizens during the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on the media richness, dialogic loop, and a series of theoretically relevant factors, such as content type, text length, and information source, we try to examine how citizen engage with their local government. By analyzing the data mining samples from Wuhan Release, the official Sina Weibo account of Wuhan’s local government, results show that, despite the unstable situation COVID-19 over the crisis, there exist three stages of a crisis on the whole. Combining the behavior of the government and the public, duration from 31 December 2019 to 19 January 2020 could be seen as the development period, then the outbreak period (30 January 2020 to 28 February 2020), and a grace period (29 February 2020 to19 April 2020). Public attention to different types of information changes over time, but curbing rumors has always been a priority. Media richness features partially influent citizen engagement. Text length is significantly positively associated with citizen engagement through government social media. However, posts containing information sources have a negative impact on citizen engagement.

The application framework of big data technology in the COVID-19 epidemic emergency management in local government—a case study of Hainan Province, China

“…Notably, the effective application of big data technology, supplemented by traditional COVID-19 epidemic emergency management measures, requires strong execution and coordination mechanisms within a government and society [ 37 ]. Public participation and public compliance are also key drivers of the effectiveness of this application [ 37 , 38 ]. The authorities need to take extensive publicity measures to increase public understanding, support and adoption before the large-scale promotion of big data interventions for epidemics.…”

“…In short, although the benefits of big data technology for the COVID-19 epidemic emergency management have been widely accepted, the process of the technology application needs to improve on its information disclosure, public privacy protection, social compliance, positive role for a government, transparency and accountability while eliminating digital discrimination and any digital divide to augment public trust, adoption, and participation [37][38][39][40].…”

Information Disclosure Contents of the COVID-19 Data Dashboard Websites for South Korea, China, and Japan: A Comparative Study

“…Concerns in each country have been growing as the Delta variant spreads. For this reason, the changing nature of the epidemic in different countries also reflects the need for governments and official departments to disclose available data and information to the public in an effective and timely manner [50].…”

Cross-Platform Comparative Study of Public Concern on Social Media during the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Empirical Study Based on Twitter and Weibo

“…After a comparison and combination of Fink and Mitroff’s models, Coombs [ 40 ] suggested a three-stage model, which included the pre-crisis, crisis, and post-crisis stages. Some existing studies have used one or more crisis lifecycle models and discovered the law of development [ 41 , 42 , 43 ].…”