Twitter usage and crisis management Within the framework of the Covid-19 pandemic of the Ministries of Health in US, UK and Turkey

Absztrakt (kivonat)

The Covid-19 pandemic, which emerged in the last days of 2019 and negatively affected our lives until the first quarter of 2022, when this thesis is being written, caused many people to die and psychological and economic problems to go far beyond expectations. With the Covid-19 pandemic, crisis management in the field of health has become much more remarkable. The limited mobility of societies during the pandemic process has provide social media gain even more importance in terms of communication. Due to the fact that social media is the main source of the news for many people in terms of access to information, it has been observed that institutions and organizations give serious weight to social media channels during the pandemic period and social media is actively used for crisis communication and management. In this context, it is a remarkable issue how the Ministries of Health, which are the most important institutions in the field of health, carry out crisis communication via Twitter during the crisis. In this master's thesis titled "Twitter usage and crisis management within the framework of the Covid-19 pandemic of the Ministries of Health in US, UK and Turkey", the period between December 27, 2021 and March 26, 2022, which is called the Fifth Wave (the last one) with the number of cases reached the highest figures throughout the whole Covid-19 pandemic, is examined. The effectiveness of crisis management on Twitter, one of the social media channels of the Ministries of Health in US, UK and Turkey, and Tweets they posted to their Twitter accounts were analyzed through the SPSS program. In this master's thesis, Crisis Communication, Crisis Management theories and Tweets posted during the aforementioned period are evaluated within the framework of Crisis and Emergency Risk Communication as an Integrative Model. Within the framework of the pandemic, which seriously affected the whole world, the definition of the crisis phenomenon and crisis management within the scope of the Fifth Wave, the situation in the mentioned countries and the reactions of the health authorities of these countries on Twitter are examined.