Representation of Minoritized Groups in Social Media Responses to UK Government Communication during COVID-19

Research on public crisis communication has highlighted the importance of studying publics’ reactions to crises (e.g., Coombs and Holladay, 2014). By reacting to authorities’ messaging during a crisis, citizens contribute to the shaping and interpretation of the crisis as it develops (Falco, 2022; Limatius and Koskela, 2024). In studying modern crises, social media discourse can provide important insights into what kind of language is used in such responses. The poster presents a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis (Baker, 2012) of UK-based social media communication during the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, we focus on the representation of minoritized ethnic groups in citizens’ responses to government social media accounts on Twitter (now ‘X’). By zooming in on tweets featuring the term BAME (‘Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic’), we address the following questions: (1) How are minoritized ethnic groups referenced and discussed in COVID-19 tweets addressing UK government accounts? (2) How is authorities’ communication regarding these groups evaluated by the citizens? Our work draws on a larger corpus of tweets constructed as part of the TRAC:COVID project (Kehoe et al., 2021). For this poster presentation, we focused on tweets responding to or mentioning seven official government accounts (ca. 12 million words). After establishing the range of terms related to ethnicity in the corpus, we decided to focus on the term BAME. Our analysis of the tweets combines quantitative and qualitative perspectives. First, we look at the frequencies of words co-occurring with BAME to establish the contexts in which BAME groups are represented. Second, we conduct a critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2013; van Dijk, 1995) of the tweets, focusing particularly on the terms that co-occurred frequently with BAME (e.g., the word “report”, certain pronouns and interrogatives). Our results show that most tweets criticize the UK government’s actions towards marginalized groups during COVID-19 and portray BAME as a vulnerable group in need of protection. However, some Twitter users’ responses to government communication also portray minorities as irresponsibly noncompliant, which contributes to racist and stereotyping discourses. Importantly, the findings of the study contribute to both crisis communication research and research on discourses related to minoritized ethnic groups (e.g., Malik et al., 2026).