Strategic Subjectivity Shapes User Engagement: A Case Study on Health Journalists’ COVID-19 Tweets

Despite their important role in spreading accurate health information, particularly during crises, health journalists have to compete for audience engagement with a variety of content, especially problematic information. This study explores how health journalists used subjective language in their COVID-19 tweets and the effects of using subjectivity on audience engagement. We gathered 11,536 publicly available original tweets related to COVID-19 from 2020 to 2022, from 45 health journalists affiliated with US media. Our results suggest that some types of subjectivity are much more common than others, with journalists often relying on politicized and collective language (e.g., we), expressing negative emotions but the use of first-person pronouns singular, moral language, positive emotions, and discrete negative emotions (anger, anxiety, sadness) appear less common. However, the types of subjective language most commonly used do not always produce audience engagement. While first-person pronouns (especially singular), moral appeals, negative emotions, anger, and anxiety predict higher engagement, politicized language appears to be counterproductive, especially for the retweet, quote, and reply counts. To obtain user engagement, health journalists can consider strategically crafting their social media messages, emphasizing morality, authenticity, and collective language over politicized language.