Communication Strategies and Compliance with Mobility Restrictions During the COVID-19 Pandemic

As a response to the Covid-19 outbreak, governments across Europe have been vested with substantial emergency powers. Among the most salient and impactful measures implemented under these regimes are the regulations designed to restrict people's mobility: enhanced border controls, limitations to internal movement of citizens, and imposition of new social distancing rules. But because these emergency decisions bare high economic and social cost, the resulting measures they impose can appear overly invasive, non-democratic and threatening to citizens, impeding on their willingness to comply. To encourage people to adhere to these demanding and costly executive decisions, governments have developed direct communication strategies using the tools provided by social media. The use of direct channels of communication has allowed governments to control their narratives while giving them unmitigated access to citizens as the crisis is unfolding in real time. In this paper, we evaluate the efficiency of these communication strategies on influencing mobility behavior change. We first identify and compare the form and content of the messages diffused on social media to incite citizen to comply with exceptional mobility restriction rules in Switzerland, France and the UK. By performing a qualitative content analysis of over 40 000 tweets about COVID-19 from national and international (EU, UN) decision-makers, we find strong variation in communication strategies across cases and through time, pointing to the idea that both actors’ characteristics and the crisis rhythm influence communication strategies. Then, by comparing this data with daily Google Community Mobility Reports, we also find that high consistency and coherence as well as low complexity of messages is linked with greater compliance towards mobility restriction measures.