Investigating people’s Liking behaviour in times of crisis

Affective dimensions of social media content (negative or positive sentiment) have been known to drive information-sharing, and emotionally charged messages tend to be shared more often than neutral ones. However, little is known about how people change the way that they engage with social media messages during a crisis. In this study, to understand the communication characteristics leading to users’ liking behaviour, we examine the ways that the emotional content (i.e. sentiment) of a message influences its popularity during a crisis, as opposed to a non-crisis period. Further, we investigate how crisis- and non-crisis-related messages drive liking behaviour during a crisis (measured through number of likes/popularity). Findings from analysing more than 440,000 Twitter posts from January to June 2019 (pre-crisis period) and March to April 2020 (the first wave of the coronavirus disease/crisis period) from the same users suggest that positive messages are liked more, and crises do not change the strength and direction of the relationship. Interestingly, crisis-related positive messages are found to have the highest popularity. The results provide a sophisticated understanding of social media audiences’ message preferences during crises and provide actionable data-driven insights into emotion valence for effective message framing to influence social transmission.