Effect of Fear Appeal Messages in Health Crisis Communication on Social Media Virality

Fear appeal messages are frequently employed in health crisis communication by governments and health authorities to promote perceptions of risks and vulnerability. Yet little scholarly attention has been paid to how threat and efficacy subsumed in fear appeal messages published by government media are related to virality and attitudes on social media using real-world data during a public health crisis such as COVID-19 since most previous research has primarily been conducted in experimental settings. Virality of such messages on social media exhibited in the form of likes, shares, and comments, and the attitudinal comments have practical implications for behavioral intentions to comply with COVID-19 preventive measures. Quantitative content analysis and corpus linguistics methods were employed to analyze the effect of fear appeal messages on social media virality and attitudes. The former was used to investigate whether fear appeal posts elicited virality in the form of likes, comments, and shares on social media in comparison to non-fear appeal posts and evaluate whether posts containing both threat and efficacy were associated more with virality than those containing threat only. The associations between the sub-dimensions of threat and efficacy and virality metrics were also examined. Corpus linguistics method was employed to reveal the attitudes of the public exhibited in the comments. The Sina Weibo social media platform for People’s Daily, a popular government news media account in China, was used as the source for data collection. All posts released from 1 January to 31 December 2020 and their corresponding virality metrics (i.e., number of likes, shares, and comments) were collected; in total, 1000 posts were sampled and manually coded. Fear appeals elicited significantly a higher number of comments, indicating favorable attitudes towards preventive measures, while messages containing both threat and efficacy generated more virality in comparison to messages with threat alone. Regarding efficacy, government leadership was a positive predictor of all virality metrics; the health sector was a positive predictor of likes and comments while public action was associated with shares. This study contributes to a richer research-informed understanding of the impact of fear appeal messages of COVID-19 on virality on social media, particularly fear appeal components that influence viral behaviors for governments and health communicators with implications for preventive behaviors.