When Crisis Conversations Converge: How Government Messaging and Online Sense‐Making Align During Crises

In modern crises, governments aim to communicate in ways that foster shared understanding, yet public interpretations often diverge, undermining response efforts. Crisis communication now unfolds in hybrid media environments where televised press conferences intersect with real‐time social media discourse. Despite this shift, we lack systematic understanding of when and how government messaging and online discourse align at the informational level. This study examines informational alignment of official crisis communication and social media discourse across six European countries during the first wave of the COVID‐19 pandemic. Drawing on quantitative text analysis of 279 government press conferences and over 409,000 tweets, the study identifies two communicative features of government messages, sentiment and linguistic complexity, and their role in shaping online engagement with government‐framed issues and the degree of overlap between press conferences and social media discourse. The findings underscore the role of message complexity and sentiment in shaping shared sense‐making during crises. This study contributes to crisis communication and public policy scholarship by bridging sender‐and audience‐focused perspectives and offering cross‐national evidence on online engagement in high‐stakes contexts.