Authors

Anastasiya Kosyk¹;  ¹ University of Munster, Germany

Discussion

Today's government communications operate in a changing media environment in which social media are a powerful tool for legitimatization strategies and relationship building; giving the opportunity to reach out, to catch up and to communicate directly with the publics. Right after the full-scale war in Ukraine the number of official government communication channels and profiles of political authorities increased on social networks. Recent studies show that social media and in particular messenger services such as Telegram became very popular for news gathering in Ukraine. That is why this study examined how Ukraine's online government communication affects the communication flow on Telegram asking three questions about the political actors' network centrality, density, and modularity. Using a computational approach for the exploratory network analysis, forwarded messages of the central political actors in Ukraine were analyzed over a period of one year since the full-scale invasion. The results revealed a highly centralized citation network with the president of Ukraine as the most forwarded political actor, whereas the parliament of Ukraine, a president's advisor and a local administration were the three main information distributors. Network density and modularity was low but had a core of the most forwarded actors, including the Ukrainian army. Considering the results, this study proposes a new digital strategy for government communication during crises.

Keywords: Government communication, online communication, crisis communication, information flow, network analysis, computational methods, Telegram