Agenda-Setting Dynamics during COVID-19: Who Leads and Who Follows?

Abstract

The outbreak of the coronavirus (COVID-19) has altered the way news media and social media set their agendas. The growth of social media raises questions about its potential power to set the media agenda. We gathered social media posts and online news site articles to examine agenda-setting dynamics, aiming to explore causal relationship between news media and social media. We used a computer-assisted text analysis to discover the main topics of discussion at the first wave of the pandemic in Latvia. The results revealed that (1) statistics about the pandemic, as well as prevention and control measures were the main topics on social media and in online news sites, and that (2) vector autoregression models provide more empirical support for the influence of online news sites on social media than reverse.