COVID-19 prevention campaigns in a digital context

The case of the “Let’s practice citizenship” government campaign in Argentina

Abstract

This exploratory-analytical work focuses on official government campaigns promoting COVID-19 prevention in Argentina. More specifically, it looks at the “Let’s practice citizenship” campaign, which called on Argentine citizens to prevent a second surge in COVID cases. We observed the publication of these announcements on digital platforms, analyzing their content and their repercussions on Twitter. In doing so, we hoped to determine the role played by “care” and “citizenship,” as theoretical and political categories, in the context of these communications. For our case study, we evaluated the public health narrative told by the national government as well as user reactions in the selected digital platform. As a theoretical framework, this article reviews the main terms used in the government campaign, so as to settle on the intended meanings of “care” and “citizenship.” We then continue with our methodological strategy, which we carried out entirely within digital media. This strategy followed two steps: first, we identified the campaign videos on YouTube, so as to closely describe them; and then, through a web scraping technique, we recovered the tweets responding to the government campaign. Our analysis identified the most common terms used in both government videos and user tweets, via word clouds generated from the results of our previous review. We conclude that users largely responded negatively to the government strategy and its narrative contradictions, as the official discourse promoted “care” and “safety” while mass mobilizations on the streets were still permitted. These user responses were typically aggressive and complained about the behavior of the country’s president and vice president, demanding that they “set an example” for citizens.