Exploring crisis management via Twitter in the age of political transparency

The advent of the Internet has greatly increased transparency and information accessibility (Jahansoozi, 2006) and created new risks for politicians and public figures by making them more visible to their constituencies (Thompson, 2005). The uncontrolled nature of mediated visibility gives rise to new kinds of mediated events (Thompson, 2005, p. 39) that interrupt a carefully constructed flow of symbolic content and undermine the self-presentation of political leaders. Thus, the development of media and especially the Internet has changed relations between visibility and power (Thompson, 2005) and forced public relations practitioners to rethink the old paradigm of crisis management (Coombs, 2012). Crisis communication is a rapidly growing area of public relations research (Coombs, 2014). Coombs and Holladay (2015) argued that although reactions (posts) on social media might not capture the opinions of all stakeholder, the messages nevertheless serve as a “rough real-time evaluation of how people are reacting to crisis responses”(p. 58). Coombs and Holladay (2015) also asserted that a crisis can be amplified through the process of retweeting. Analysis of recent studies shows that traditional media are the primary source of crisis-related information across all social media platforms (Austin & Jin, 2015). Therefore, strategies public relations specialists employ have the potential to influence the way reporters cover crises. A number of studies have shown a positive effect of stealing thunder (an organization talking about a crisis before media break the news) on the perceptions of crisis severity and guilt (Arpan & Roskos-Ewoldsen, 2005 …