Communication of emerging infectious diseases in the digital era

Abstract

Risk communication in Twitter during the 2014 Ebola outbreak is studied in this investigation. Our research analizes three main issues: the content analysis of the Ebola´s coverage in Twitter, the research of the communication style of Twitter in this outbreak and the contextualization of both in the information habits in health crises. For that 28,760 tweets about Ebola were analyzed and a survey about information habits in health crises to 294 people was carried out. The results highlighted that Twitter changes the way to inform in health crisis, transforming the communication of the traditional mass media. In this transformation the unique discourse of the traditional media is criticised and the emotional perspective is underlined. Finally, the social implications of the results and the importance of social network communication in future health crises are discussed.