Change in Humor Styles on Twitter during Development of Ebola Crisis.
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2016-05-30
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en
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Abstract
An ongoing trend in the field of crisis communications is the increased presence of humorous tweets during crises. The current study aims to contribute to the knowledge about this trend by analyzing which types of humor are more common at what moment in the crisis’ development, are more prevalent in which content categories and are more often used by which types of users. This was done by evaluating 10.000 tweets – selected from a larger corpus containing tweets about the Ebola crisis – on type of humor, content type and user type. Findings showed that the amount of humorous tweets peaked about half a year after the start of the crisis. Moreover, governmental organizations and civilians were found to use the highest amount of humor. Also, humor was present the most in tweets containing first hand reporting and in tweets criticizing the government. The outcomes for specific types of humor were highly diverse. The findings of this study are especially useful for those organizations and institutions who wish to actively take part in the online discussion during crises. They can use these outcomes in adapting their social media content strategies.
Keywords: crisis communications, Ebola, humor, social media, Twitter.
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