Document Type
Article
Abstract
Crisis communication strategies must be tailored to the unique nature of social media. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, public health agencies have widely used social media to address vaccine hesitancy and misinformation. This research utilized the social media pandemic communication model to describe the key themes disseminated through the Ontario government and the Public Health Agency of Canada’s vaccine-related crisis communication on X (formerly Twitter). Between 27 January 2020 and 6 April 2021, 1271 posts related to COVID-19 vaccination were collected from three official government X accounts——two from the province of Ontario and one from Canada. Posts were analyzed and coded according to their message characteristics, main themes, and sub-themes. Both levels of government expressed similar themes of vaccine safety, benefits of vaccination, and addressed vaccine hesitancy; however, differed in terms of their messaging strategies used.
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
Publication Info
Published in Facets, Volume 10, 2025.
APA Citation
Burney, S., Donelle, L., & Kothari, A. (2025). Exploring the Public Health Agency of Canada’s and the Ontario government’s vaccine-related crisis communication on X during the COVID-19 pandemic. FACETS, 10, 1–16.https://doi.org/10.1139/facets-2022-0186
Rights
© 2025 The Author(s). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.