Reactions to Governmental Public Health Organizations Post-COVID-19: A Social Media Analysis

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis was to examine the reactions to Canadian public health organizations' messaging through a social media analysis by answering the following two research questions: 1) How did different levels of government use social media communication to inform the public of COVID-19 information during the reopening phase? 2) What was the public response to the lifting of COVID-19 measures? COVID-19-related Tweets posted by Ottawa Public Health (OPH), Public Health Ontario (PHO), and Health Canada and the Public Health Agency of Canada (HC & PHAC) and their replies were collected using the Twitter API through Python. Sentiment analysis of the data was conducted using the VADER tool. This was followed by a thematic analysis of Twitter threads to identify patterns in the Tweets posted by each organization and their respective replies. Results of the VADER sentiment analysis indicate OPH Tweets were mostly positive, whereas HC & PHAC Tweets were slightly more positive than neutral. PHO Tweets were mostly neutral. Public social media replies to the selected public health organizations were also measured; replies to both OPH and HC & PHAC were more negative than positive, although replies to OPH were slightly more positive compared to replies to HC & PHAC. Thematic analysis revealed five themes regarding public health organizations' use of social media communications and eight themes relating to the public response to information posted by the selected public health organizations. The results from both sentiment and thematic analysis can help inform recommendations to enhance communication by Canadian governmental organizations, especially in public health systems, and offer recommendations for public health social media communication to inform future disaster response policies.