Information saturation, geographic dispersion and political party in government communication: A study of health agencies and public engagement on social media during the Covid-19 pandemic

Government agencies are expected to communicate crisis and risk information to the public, including on social media where the public retransmits this information. However, it remains unclear how crisis or risk severity impact levels of government communication to the public. As the risk of a novel emergency spreads across time and space, online agency communication and public response may intensify accordingly to inform the population or push them to be safer. At the same time, political ideology is increasingly associated with health and science communication, and therefore may be a relevant factor in government health and risk communication. Lastly, related studies are focused on one platform or another, but it is well established that social media have different publics and affordances. To address these issues, we thus study the relationship between Covid-19 severity and the extent of government communication on social media, by asking: Does covid-19 severity impact levels of government communication and public sharing of government information? Is there a potential role of platforms, or politics of a region, in this level of communication and public sharing? To address these questions, we examine the association between Covid-19 cases and deaths, and levels of Covid-19 related messaging across local, state and federal government health agencies in the United States. We also examine differences in levels of communication between states and localities governed by different political parties across the two major social media in the US, Facebook and Twitter. We find some substantial differences in levels of government communication and public sharing across media, regions and political parties of governments. However, the impact of covid-19 severity on this is less clear. We explain the patterns observed based on notions of information saturation and social media’s bursty activities and contagion dynamics. Differences across places with distinct political leadership may be explained by ideology of political leaders, but further research is needed to understand the direction of these effects.