Agenda Dynamics on Social Media During COVID-19 Pandemic: Interactions Between Public, Media, and Government Agendas

ABSTRACT Social media has profoundly altered the way the public, the media, and the government set their agendas. To examine the dynamics between public, government, and media agendas, this study collected posts on Sina Weibo during the COVID-19 pandemic in China from January 2020 to July 2020. The word2vec model and Granger causality analysis were used to measure agenda networks and examine the agenda dynamics. The results show that (1) pandemic statistics were the central issue in public, media, and government agenda networks, (2) the government’s agenda influenced the media’s agenda, and (3) the public agenda affected both media and government agendas. The findings suggest that the public agenda was more influential than the media agenda and the government agenda on Weibo during the COVID-19 pandemic in China. This study contributes to the literature by examining agenda-setting dynamics in a pandemic context. It also extends existing methods by modeling implicit relationships between attributes in agenda networks.