Emergence of leaders in digital space in the presence of an overarching global threat

Abstract

In an offline world, there are leaders across the world. These leaders are leaders because of their expertise in their respective domains such as politics, business, media, health care, etc. In a normal setting (pre-COVID), these leaders have the power to influence his/her followers in their respective domains of expertise. However, in recent times of Pandemic, with the plethora of information floating across social media, people are uncertain of what to believe or whom to believe. Due to lack of credible resources of information during a multidimensional crisis- COVID 19, people are turning towards their offline leaders looking for information and assurance. Covid-19 Pandemic has forced people to focus on health more than anything else. Given this kind of a pandemic situation, leaders who are leaders in the offline world (pre-COVID scenario), not necessarily experts in the health domain, are emerging as leaders in the online world. We want to explore depending on the domain of the person who is tweeting, is there any difference in how their content is getting disseminated. In these kinds of tough times, leader’s communication in reaching out to people will influence people in multiple dimensions. In this study, we hypothesize that offline leaders adopt a different type of communication style and this difference in communication style will have an impact on public reaction towards them (user engagement).