Abstract
The past nine months witnessed COVID-19's fast-spreading at the global level. Limited by medical resources shortage and uneven facilities distribution, online help-seeking becomes an essential approach to cope with public health emergencies for many ordinaries. This study explores the driving forces behind the retransmission of online help-seeking posts. We built an analytical framework that emphasized content characteristics, including information completeness, proximity, support seeking type, disease severity, and emotion of help-seeking messages. A quantitative content analysis was conducted with a probability sample consisting of 727 posts. The results illustrate the importance of individual information completeness, high proximity, instrumental support seeking. This study also demonstrates slight inconformity with the severity principle but stresses the power of anger in help-seeking messages dissemination. As one of the first online help-seeking diffusion analyses in the COVID-19 period, our research provides a reference for constructing compelling and effective help-seeking posts during a particular period. It also reveals further possibilities for harnessing social media's power to promote reciprocal and cooperative actions as a response to this deepening global concern.
Highlights
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), COVID-19 has resulted in more than 14 million confirmed cases and nearly 0.6 million deaths worldwide by July 20th, 2020 [1]
We propose the following: H1: Completeness of individual information in online help-seeking posts is positively associated with retransmission
This study explores the driving forces behind online help-seeking post transmission in a global pandemic period by emphasizing the content characteristics
Summary
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), COVID-19 has resulted in more than 14 million confirmed cases and nearly 0.6 million deaths worldwide by July 20th, 2020 [1]. Due to the destructive power and highly infectious feature of this new coronavirus, many countries have taken various kinds of measures to prevent virus transmission. People use social media to acquire and exchange multiple types of information at a historic and unprecedented scale [2].
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