Online Social Networking Services are increasingly present as one of the places where citizens get
informed about the most varied topics. The COVID-19 pandemic brings a reinforcement in the
analysis of what was published in these services and the role of State institutions in the dissemination
in this context. Therefore, the objective of this research is to analyze the posts on Online Social
Networking Services by government institutions related to the COVID-19 pandemic, especially the
informative nature of these bodies and the timeliness, to identify the relationship between the posts
and the support of official documents of these bodies. As methodological procedures, the following
actions were delimited: i) perform data collection of the messages of these bodies, including
information on which Online Social Networking Service was collected, the date of publication of the
message, the message hyperlink and if the message has a link for any official document that supports
the veracity of the content published; ii) analyze the information collected, including the calculation of
representativeness of messages supported by official documents, which social networking services are
most used, and periods in which messages were broadcast throughout the year during the COVID-19
pandemic period ; iii) check which are the most used classification terms in the Online Social
Networking Service during the pandemic (where only the hashtags were considered classification
terms), and; iv) carry out the analysis of official documents to understand the characteristics of the
official information sources that support the message, when the user is directed to the websites of these
bodies. The sample was delimited to the study of the official pages of the Military Fire Brigade in the
states of Pará, Ceará, São Paulo, Santa Catarina, and Goiás in the Social Networking Services Online
Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, with data collected between from March 5th, 2020 to May 29th,
2020. The results show timeliness in the publication of content in these services in the first days of the
pandemic. In a second moment, it stabilized between 0 to 5 daily posts. The publications were marked
with classificatory terms related to the theme, as well as information for georeferencing. A low
percentage of publications are linked to official documents that support the information provided. This
situation is aggravated by the verification that only the Military Fire Department of Pará adopted this
form. Another factor verified is that the existence of an institutional account in Online Social
Networking Services does not guarantee that an agency is using it. It is noteworthy that the Instagram
Online Social Network Service was the service with the greatest dissemination of information by the
Military Fire Departments; and concerning the number of posts by the Military Fire Brigade in the
Social Network Services Online, the regions of Goiás, Santa Catarina and Pará are highlighted. It is
concluded that, in times of crisis like a pandemic, the performance of professional information can
mean a more assertive strategy for planning, classifying the content to be broadcast, as well as offering
ways to mitigate the dissemination of false news on Online Social Networking Services, especially by
establishing a more granular information flow to the citizen, where the publication could be the access
point for content produced by these bodies.
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