Citizen-state interactions on social media during a pandemic: Lessons from Japan

Fast, efficient and cheap, social media has already become an important platform in crisis management. In Japan, social media also played a significant role during large-scale disasters. However, evidence from twitter shows the Japanese government failed to establish an effective interaction with citizens during first wave of COVID-19. Combining methods such as sentiment analysis and LDA topic modeling, the results suggest that the government was insufficient to explain the policy and respond to public, the monologue of politicians and bureaucrats led to sustained negative emotion on internet. On the other hand, situation awareness with big data from internet show considerable timeliness and predictability during a pandemic. However, administrative responses to the COVID-19 were still mainly affected by elections and center-local political relations in Japan, which make it difficult to innovate the crisis management mechanism with new technologies. Furthermore, Japanese administrative responses to the COVID-19 during the first wave essentially blocked diversified participants and platforms including social media, which result in the inefficiency of the renowned disaster prevention administration system.