Hashtag activism and message frames: social network analysis of Instagram during the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak in Indonesia

Abstract

During the Coronavirus pandemic, social media played an essential role in disseminating information online by utilizing various message frames and hashtags. Instagram is a popular social media worldwide that are used to spread various information. This study applied the social network analysis (SNA) approach as a theoretical framework and explored how the relationship between users on the Instagram platform related to Coronavirus outbreaks. Moreover, we also investigate how the relationship between users and their hashtags. SNA techniques were used for visualizing network models using an undirected graph, measuring network attributes, and centrality measures to find the most influential users in the network. A total of 10,403 posts based on #wabahcorona on Instagram from February 28, 2020, to May 18, 2020, were analyzed. Based on the analysis results, hashtags play an important role in this topic. Degree centrality measure as connectivity number shows that only two user accounts can make it into the list’s top ten. When using the Eigenvector centrality measure, there are no users in the top ten. The modularity measure detects 122 distinct communities that show the dense connection of nodes in the networks. Betweenness centrality measure shows that there are six related hashtags to COVID-19 pandemic out of ten hashtags. They are #wabahcorona, #covid19, #corona, #viruscorona, #dirumahaja, and #coronavirus and the four are Islamic related hashtags. The Islamic related hashtags are caused by the date of Ramadhan month.