Common Ground In Crisis: Causal Narrative Networks of Public Official Communications During the COVID-19 Pandemic

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how U.S. public agencies used causal narratives in social media during COVID-19, revealing consistent patterns and the impact of discourse structure on message engagement.

Contribution

It introduces a method to extract and analyze causal narratives from official communications, highlighting their structure, evolution, and influence on public engagement.

Findings

Causal networks are complex but show cross-agency consistency.

Concept position affects message retransmission independently of other factors.

Discourse structure influences public engagement with official messages.

Abstract

This study investigates the use of causal narratives in public social media communications by U.S. public agencies over the first fifteen months of the COVID-19 pandemic. We extract causal narratives in the form of cause/effect pairs from official communications, analyzing the resulting semantic network to understand the structure and dependencies among concepts within agency discourse and the evolution of that discourse over time. We show that although the semantic network of causally-linked claims is complex and dynamic, there is considerable consistency across agencies in their causal assertions. We also show that the position of concepts within the structure of causal discourse has a significant impact on message retransmission net of controls, an important engagement outcome.