Engaging the Public in Disaster Communication: The Effect of Message Framing on Sharing Intentions for Social Media Posts

In times of emergency, organizations and members of the public have generated and shared crowdsourced information to help damaged communities. Using the 2018 California Camp Fire as a case study, this study explores how communication interventions influence people’s online message-sharing intentions. Specifically, through the lens of construal-level theory and prospect theory, this study demonstrates the direct and moderate persuasive effects of message framing on sharing intentions for Facebook posts. Using an online experiment with Amazon Mechanical Turk workers (N = 475), this study found that a gain-framed message encourages social media post-sharing intentions. The persuasive power of first-person versus third-person perspective frames differed depending on the use of gain versus loss frames. The discussion highlights the theoretical and practical implications of our findings.