“You just don’t expect serious crisis information on a platform like Instagram.” : A qualitative study about Swedish civilians’ social media usage and information seeking behaviours in relation to crisis information.

Abstract: This qualitative study investigates people's media use and engagement on social media. By combining prompts material and qualitative interviews with theories such as the social mediated crisis communication model (Austin et al., 2012) and uses and gratifications theory (Katz et al., 1973; McQuail, 1984), it is delimited to drawing insights into how people themselves seek information in crisis situations but also how they prefer to get information about different crises mainly to national and local levels. These perspectives enhance the study and cover perspectives in people's behaviour regarding crisis information through different perspectives on people's media usage and behavior concerning information seeking about crises in different environments such as social media but also traditional media. Moreover, this study is centred around social media use, information seeking, information vetting, and information sharing. Further, misinformation, information sharing by influential people and organisations on digital platforms are also brought up and discussed in this study, which gives background to tendencies of motivation to people’s behaviour concerning perceiving and seeking information in a digital landscape versus traditional media.  In addition, the current state of digitalisation has provided new ways of extending mass communication than more traditional communication methods such as television, radio, and newspapers (McQuail, 2010; Lindgren, 2017). In crisis, the digital landscape therefore presents an opportunity to spread and receive information, including crisis information, through means such as the Internet and social media platforms (Eriksson, 2018; Lindgren, 2017). This makes it a useful tool for organisations when it comes to crisis communication, providing more timely and punctual communication to a wider audience and stakeholders. Thus, it is important for authorities, organisations and society to understand how civilians receive and interpret the meaning of crisis information, recognising that digitalisation has evolved ways in which people receive and interpret information (Castells et al., 2007; Lindgren, 2017; McQuail, 2010). By understanding how crisis information is perceived and interpreted by individuals in the digital landscape, it enables development of effective crisis communication strategies to emerge, making it an important aspect within crisis communication research (Austin et al., 2012; Jin & Pang, 2010; Vigsø, 2016).