Digital citizens’ feelings in national #Covid 19 campaigns in Spain

Abstract

Background: In 2020 Spain launched an official campaign, #EsteVirusLoParamosUnidos, aimed at uniting the entire country through citizen cooperation, in order to combat Covid-19. The objective of this research has been to analyse how this Twitter campaign revealed the feelings expressed by Spanish citizens. Methods: The research is based on a composite design that triangulates, from a theoretical model, a quantitative analysis and a qualitative analysis. Results: Of the 7,357 tweets in the sample, 72.32% were found to be retweets. Four content families were extracted which relate to politics, education, messages to society and the defence of occupational groups. The feelings expressed ranged from those of unity, admiration and support to those of discontent and criticism of issues regarding the health situation. Conclusions: The development of networked socio-political and technical measures, which enabled citizen participation, facilitated the development of new patterns of interaction between national or regional governments and digital citizens. This increased citizens’ possibilities of influencing the public agenda and, therefore, strengthening citizen engagement regarding specific situations.

Keywords

• Digital citizenship
• Twitter
• e-participation
• Covid-19
• Discourse analysis