CRISIS COMMUNICATION IN THE UKRAINE-RUSSIA CONFLICT: USE OF FACEBOOK BY UN HUMANITARIAN ORGANIZATIONS
The proliferation of social media has made it incredibly simple to quickly disseminate valuable information to a large audience. Thus, numerous organizations are now heavily leveraging these social networking platforms as a means for managing their crisis responses. Through a content analysis of 355 posts concerning the Ukraine-Russia conflict made by five large UN humanitarian organizations between February and May, 2022, on their official Facebook pages, this study investigated organizational crisis communication patterns. Findings suggest that UN humanitarian organizations extensively used "threat" and "need for change" as crisis characteristics to delineate the Ukraine-Russia situation, whereas “protection of safety and security,” “medical assistance,” and “fundraising” appeared as prevailing crisis response themes. Furthermore, “like,” “care,” and other reactions skewed toward posts that called for a “peaceful resolution” of the war. Finally, this study recommends creating war-crisis messages using defensive framing, and fortifying negative sentiment.
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