Social listening, modern slavery, and COVID-19

In addition to the public health crisis visited upon the world, the COVID-19 pandemic has created unique uncertainties for organisations engaged with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), spanning a range of matters, such as maintaining operational momentum, financial sustainability, achieving policy influence, and engaging in strategic communications. In this article, we focus on organisations engaged in the fight against modern slavery, a significant part of Sustainable Development Goal 8, which seeks to ‘promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all’ with a particular focus on the call for states to ‘[t]ake immediate and effective measures to … end modern slavery’ (SDG 8.7). Our analysis highlights the importance of ‘social listening’ during the temporal and spatial progression of COVID-19 to: (a) facilitate the identification of agenda proxies reflected in strategic communications used by anti-slavery organisations, and (b) to provide insights into changing communication tactics deployed by these organisations in the context of mass-communication using social media as a result of the global pandemic.