In December 2019, hospitals in Wuhan, Hubei province, China, identified several unknown pneumonia cases, which were later confirmed to be caused by a new type of coronavirus. Then the World Health Organization (WHO) renamed this disease, COVID-19 on 11 February 2020. This study took this public health crisis as a case due to its global pandemic nature and grave threat to human life and health. Wuhan, as the early city to be affected, has gradually recovered from the crisis. The experience from Wuhan would be helpful and enlightening for the other regions which still suffer the COVID-19 heavily. After the outbreak of COVID-19, official Weibo accounts were one of the most important sources of crisis-related information [89]. There were few studies focused on the information release and crisis response during the COVID-19 [27,90], but there is a lack the research about the communication behavior of the local government and the citizens’ reaction during the COVID-19. This study focuses on the official Weibo account Wuhan Release of Wuhan’s local government. There are three reasons for this: first, Weibo is one of the most popular SM platforms in China and has the first series of government accounts with a large number of followers (more than 3.78 million). Second, people prefer official news sources with strong authority and credibility during a crisis, and the Wuhan citizens were more likely to choose local media as their main source [33], thus Wuhan Release played an irreplaceable role in crisis communication to Wuhan citizens. Third, there exists the possibility that the government may regulate the content on social media by deleting or screening negative, sensitive, and extreme comments [91], which could influence the validity and reliability of the data from social media. We choose an official outlet is that it could relatively relieve the influence from the Internet censorship, that’s because the official media sifted through the information at the time of its release, and the research data would not be heavily influenced by the sensitivity of the topics discussed and the division of opinion [92].