Aspects of Quality and Reliability of Ebola Virus Disease Information on Facebook

Abstract

Social media has been heavily relied upon to disseminate information about the Ebola virus disease (EVD) since its outbreak in West Africa during 2014–2015. This study was conducted to determine the types of content and the reliability and quality of information about EVD on Facebook during the period. Adopting a content analysis research design, the study used Google’s Keyword Planner and impressionistic information from experts engaged in discussion on the subject matter on Facebook. The keywords were entered into Facebook’s advanced search tool to retrieve 217 Facebook groups created in English between July 2014 and December 2014. Experts rated 72.7% of the EVD information on social media as not medically reliable while 66.7% of the Facebook groups’ information on EVD was considered irrelevant. There is a need to regulate health information sharing on social media; mass social media education is required to discipline creators of posts and users who share posts and to regulate what they do on social media.