Engaging the Public in Disaster Communication: The Effect of Message Framing on Sharing Intentions for Social Media Posts

ABSTRACT

In times of emergency, organizations and members of the public have generated and shared crowdsourced information to help damaged communities. Using the 2018 California Camp Fire as a case study, this study explores how communication interventions influence people’s online message-sharing intentions. Specifically, through the lens of construal-level theory and prospect theory, this study demonstrates the direct and moderate persuasive effects of message framing on sharing intentions for Facebook posts. Using an online experiment with Amazon Mechanical Turk workers (N = 475), this study found that a gain-framed message encourages social media post-sharing intentions. The persuasive power of first-person versus third-person perspective frames differed depending on the use of gain versus loss frames. The discussion highlights the theoretical and practical implications of our findings.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ This study chose Facebook as an outlet for the following reasons: As of the first quarter of 2019, Facebook was one of the most widely used social media services among adults in the U.S. (Perrin & Anderson, 2019) with over 2.38 billion monthly active users (Facebook, 2019); it enables social media users to engage with content easily by offering options to “share” and “like” content. Hence like other experimental studies on social media engagement (e.g., J. Kim, 2020), this study considered Facebook a suitable platform for experiments.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Center for Health and Risk Communication at the University of Maryland.