Tourism content on Twitter (X) during a crisis

This study examines nearly half a million tweets that were produced during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic (co-authored by Lluís Garay Tamajón and GEO’s Maartje Roelofsen) . Some of the key takeaways from this study:

·A wide variety of themes and topics prevailed on the platforms, including those that alluded to the potential recovery of tourism. Nevertheless, a large amount of content on X had little or nothing to do with tourism, despite being linked to tourism via tourism-related hashtags or terms.

·Automated (bot) accounts made a major contribution to the distribution of such content and included accounts associated with the promotion of commercial activities such as the advertisement of cryptocurrency schemes, NFTs, or private web domains.

·Credible tourism-related content was, to a large degree, undermined by issues of representation. Globally acknowledged tourism authorities and tourism-related governmental entities remained underrepresented when it came to consistently and frequently publishing original or first-hand content.

·The content of some Ministries of Tourism and formal tourism organizations were among that most replied to, but the study also found that these user accounts were few in number and were overshadowed by the user accounts of conservative and right-wing politicians and state leaders in the North American, Indian, UK, and Australian contexts.

·Content written in English also displayed issues of representation when it came to the locations in which content is produced: informational hegemony is given when Twitter (X) accounts primarily originate in countries in the Global North and/or where the English-language is an official language as opposed to a lingua franca. In addition, the study shows that women are exceptionally underrepresented on tourism-Twitter (X), accounting for under 8% of both the top 40 most-active and the top-40 most-replied-to profiles.

This study has been published open access and is available here: 

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666957924000144