“We Do Not Have Any Further Info to Add, Unfortunately”–Strategic Disengagement on Public Health Facebook Pages

Abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic, communication with the public has been a central concern for state actors. One important question has been how to best use social media to ensure the sufficient uptake of their advice and recommendations to the public. With regard to such strategic communicative aims, a significant amount of attention has been previously devoted to the engagement, interaction, and dialogic forms of strategic communication on social media. This paper, however, focuses on an aspect that has not been discussed much in the literature: the need an organization might have to disengage due to a lack of resources or when a conversation has stalled. Using the communication that Scandinavian public health authorities carried out through their Facebook pages as cases, this paper employs a thematic analysis of the associated posts and qualitative interviews with employees to argue that these institutions use three disengagement strategies: 1) contradiction, 2) meta-discursive disengagement, and 3) disengagement through sympathy/empathy. Based on this, we consider the strategic potential of disengagement and discuss whether disengagement strategies can be considered legitimate tools for public health organizations’ crisis communication that can allow them to achieve the dual aim of ensuring citizens’ support for and compliance with authorities’ recommendations.