Transmedia context and twitter as conditioning the ecuadorian government's action. The case of the “Guayaquil emergency” during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

Communication ecosystems have multiplexed and increased their capacity to act, distort, and fight. COVID-19 pandemic and the response of the Ecuadorian Government to it are clear examples of the power of media to erode, to influence, and also to produce fake news. In this context, Twitter has become more than just a social platform, as it helped spread catastrophic pictures of the country, especially of Guayaquil. This article analyzes the tweets posted by the main domestic and global media and by the Ecuadorian government accounts since the outbreak of the pandemic in Ecuador, as well as the interrelations among them and their polarity score. The aim is to show how the government changed its action plan by focusing on exogenous elements that had been excluded from its (pre)established strategy, which consisted in neglecting and deliberately minimizing a situation that turned out to be more serious than officially deemed and that was exposed by unofficial global media.