The Syrian refugee crisis: how local governments and NGOs manage their image via social media

Abstract

This study, based on situational crisis communication theory and set in the context of the Syrian refugee crisis, seeks first to conduct a comparative analysis of the management of online citizen engagement by local governments and non‐governmental organisations (NGOs). Second, it aims to examine the relationship between certain factors pertaining to the types of responses submitted by citizens via the social media of the aforementioned actors. The sample is composed of several Spanish local governments and NGOs belonging to Red de Municipios de Acogida de Refugiados (Local Government Network for Refugee Allocation). The main findings are that NGOs' online engagement with citizens is more than that of local governments. Notably, NGOs are much more active on their Facebook pages than are local governments. The two actors converge, though, in terms of disseminating instructive information and paying less attention to ‘basic crisis response options’. Moreover, the factors ‘content type’, ‘reputation’, and ‘woman’ affect the type of response messages sent by citizens.

The moderating effects of entertainers on public engagement through government activities in social media during the COVID-19

“…Thus, the findings indicated that online posts with positive content attracted more attention on social media. This finding is in line with Ferrara and Yang ( del Mar Gálvez‐Rodríguez et al, 2019 ) who explained it as the “positive bias” effect in social media. In other words, people are more inclined to share and favor positive content, especially during times of crisis.…”

“…The findings indicated that while OOI did not receive large numbers of comments and likes, it tended to have more reposts on social media. Online posts with positive content attracted more attention during the crisis, which showed “positive bias” ( del Mar Gálvez‐Rodríguez et al, 2019 ). Regarding the COVID-19 pandemic, the findings showed citizens were more sensitive to official online posts of good news (e.g., “The number of asymptomatic infected people has been cleared.”) than those conveying bad news (e.g., “A new case of COVID-19 was found in China.”)…”

From Organizational-Centric Engagement to Network-Centric Engagement: The Role of Autonomous Public Communities in a Mediated Public Policy Advocacy Network

“…Following Yang and Saffer (2019) and del Mar Gálvez-Rodríguez et al (2019), publics-initiated engagement is operationalized as the number of times a user account retweets or mentions the focal organization.…”

“…Publics-Initiated Engagement. FollowingYang and Saffer (2019) and del MarGálvez-Rodríguez et al (2019), publics-initiated engagement is operationalized as the number of times a user account retweets or mentions the focal organization.Focal Organization-Initiated Engagement. Again followingYang and Saffer (2019) and del Mar Gálvez-Rodríguez et al (2019), organization-initiated engagement refers to the number of times an organization retweets or mentions a user.…”

Understanding interactions among citizens, government authorities, media, and ngos on twitter during natural disaster

“…Current studies show that news media and journalism play an important role in propagating critical information from official actors to citizens (Ojala, Pantti, & Laaksonen, ) and enabling citizens to evaluate official actors' conduct. Non‐government organizations (NGOs) often use social media to interact with citizens and are much more active than government agencies (Gálvez‐Rodríguez, Haro‐de‐Rosario, & Caba‐Pérez, ). However, in the situation of natural disasters, how different stakeholders interact with each other on social media has not been fully investigated.…”