Social media and COVID-19 pandemic: Enhancing panic or preventing it?

Abstract

Social media has provided the best source of information about the COVID-19 pandemic across the world. Updates are received via social media, and people encourage keep-up with public health measures to stay safe. Using best practices in crisis communication theory as the theoretical framework; this article investigates how social media is used in informing people during the COVID-19 pandemic and its possible impact. This study employed an online survey to investigate whether social media platforms helped to educate and prevent the COVID-19 pandemic or have instead caused panic among the Ghanaian migrants in Beijing, China. The statistical population of this study consisted of the entire 472 members of the WeChat groups of Ghanaian migrants while purposive sampling was used to select 460 Ghanaian migrants. The findings from this study indicated that the utilization of social media has dramatically caused panic among the Ghanaian Migrant community during the COVID-19 pandemic. Public educations regarding pandemics are done through social media; therefore, there is a need to monitor social media usage. From a critical search of the literature on studies on social media and COVID-19, this article happens to be among the very few papers on how many social media has caused panic during the COVID-19 global public health crisis. Also, this study will contribute to both academia and policymaker’s knowledge of how information disseminates on similar future public health crises.