How Online Communities Shape Information and Public Perceptions during a Pandemic
Millions of people around the world, and more than half of all American adults, rely on social media as their primary source of information. Both Facebook and Twitter have reported a surge in their daily user activity since the beginning of the global COVID-19 crisis in early 2020. Such platforms have been indispensable in enabling rapid and wide-reaching pandemic response measures during the coronavirus outbreak, including disseminating accurate content from trustworthy sources, encouraging the collaboration of scientist teams toward generating reliable evidence-based equipment and medical therapies, and circumventing social isolation for vulnerable populations such as older individuals. Of course, misinformation remains a persistent and unremitting digital scourge for policymakers, public health officials, technologists, and laypeople alike.
However, it would be remiss of us not to acknowledge that we are not simply passive consumers — that our relationship with the internet is a two-way street. The very existence of social media is predicated on discourse. But in the context of this pandemic, with whom are we communicating and what exactly are people saying?
Information and misinformation spreads within communities of like-minded individuals
Many of us have built our social networks over the course of the past decade, acquiring connections from among our peers and colleagues, or among mutual friends shared with those same people. Every time we open our Facebook newsfeeds, we find ourselves at the center of a community with shared values and ideals — bar the occasional disagreeable acquaintance who, depending on your degree of closeness, may be subject to an ex-parte unfriending. We can even join Groups to connect further with people who like the same things as we do. As Jia Tolentino opines on internet culture in her book “Trick Mirror,” we as individuals tend to read “things written for people just like us.”
These shared interests have led social media users to construct groups dedicated to sharing best practices for adapting to the changing digital needs within their professional disciplines. Those who have best taken advantage of Facebook’s Groups feature during this pandemic include educators, religious professionals, musicians, and those in the foodservice space. For instance, math, Spanish, film, theatre, and music teachers have utilized these spaces to provide strategies for how to design effective online lessons, suggest platforms for online group work, and circulate interactive worksheets for students of all years. Professionals in other groups have similarly corralled public interest by hosting discussions on how their industries have been impacted by coronavirus, sharing relevant policy and public health updates, and creating value-based frameworks for approaching difficult decisions.
But groups can also coalesce around controversial and polarized personal viewpoints, to insidious effect. Groups dedicated to coronavirus conspiracy theories have become increasingly visible. For example, one claim circulating in these groups is that local and state lockdowns are excuses for our government to assert control over the people and strip away American rights. Despite Facebook’s attempts to direct its users to accurate sources, support fact-checking, and combat misinformation, these echo chambers have proven difficult to penetrate.
This is because confirmation bias, which exists in all groups, creates credibility for any information (even false) that strengthens preferred narratives, and resistance to any information (even true) that undermines these narratives. So when our government officials, federal agencies, and news media outlets publish contradictory information and acrid criticisms of each other, people will simply select whichever information best suits their purpose. Those who already believe that quarantining is an unnecessary precaution, or a baseless conspiracy, will gravitate to information that supports this belief. These individuals may support proposals to lift lockdowns in order to rescue our deflated economy, consequences come as they will. In this complex decision-making calculus where the economic toll of a prolonged lockdown (rising unemployment and small business closure rates) must be thoughtfully balanced with the risk of resuming normal social interactions (a deadly resurgence of disease), proponents from both sides have likely already made up their minds. Confirmation bias has therefore fueled the survival and rabidity of conspiracy theory and political extremist groups, as well as the spread of biased information (and frank misinformation) among its members.
1,200 Instagram posts reveal collective coronavirus-related attitudes and behaviors
While Facebook creates closed communities of like-minded people, Instagram and Twitter paint a holistic picture of our shared civic reality. An individual’s Explore feed allows them to discover only posts tailored to their specific preferences, but social science researchers can take one further step — by collecting a sample of all most recent or most liked public posts at a given point in time, these platforms can be used as barometers to gauge overall public opinion.
Here, I harnessed publicly accessible data from Instagram in order to better understand coronavirus-related attitudes and behaviors. I used a modified version of InstaCrawlR to analyze which topics Instagram users commonly associated with the hashtag #coronavirus on March 21, 2020, ten days after the WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic, eight days after the United States enacted its travel ban, and just four days after San Francisco enacted its shelter-in-place policy.[1]
Unsurprisingly, tags were clustered by nationality and language.[2] The purple hashtags reflect the response of Spanish- and Portugese-language Instagram users to coronavirus — that is, this cluster demonstrates that #brasil, #chile, #colombia, #mexico, and #venezuela were frequently used in conjunction with other tags in this cluster. Other associated topics included #cuarentina, #prevencion, #yomequedoencasa and #quedateencasa (both meaning, stay at home).
The dark green hashtags are related to the Italian response, showing associated topics such as #andràtuttobene (everything will be fine) and #iorestoacasa (stay at home). On March 21, just 10 days after the Democratic Party leader had urged people to “not change their habits”, Italy totaled 53,000 recorded infections and 4,800 dead.
Finally, the blue hashtags represent the response from English-language countries, including the U.S. Among these, emphasized themes include emotional well-being (#anxiety, #mentalhealth), behaviors (#lockdown, #quarantine, #socialdistancing, #stayhome, #washyourhands, #workfromhome), and coping mechanisms (#netflix, #selfcare).
One prevailing takeaway is that in late March 2020, most Instagram users around the world talking about coronavirus agreed with the sentiment that we should stay at home in order to prevent further spread of the pandemic. As Italy was nearing the peak of its COVID-19 crisis, people retained an optimistic outlook. And in the U.S., when we were just beginning to embrace social distancing and working from home, our focus was on emotional well-being, coping mechanisms, and washing our hands. Our collective reaction to coronavirus at any given point in time during this pandemic is preserved faithfully on social media for future analysis, even if it takes a frantic race against censorship in China to ensure this.
Social media will continue to reveal how information and public perceptions are spread
Updates have continued to emerge over the past three weeks of this pandemic, including concerns about hampered Passover and Easter celebrations, much-awaited stimulus checks, and new developments in the 2020 election cycle. To this end, it may be interesting to examine how long it takes for current events to emerge into the public eye. Using social media as the conduit for public perception, we can assess how many days after a new policy is announced, or a new statistic revealed, we actually begin to change our attitudes and behaviors.
As the coronavirus crisis evolves further, Facebook and Instagram will be useful in identifying how online communities shape and spread information. Even once the direct public health burden eases, social media will be critical in keeping abreast of the real-time developments of both positive and negative downstream sequelae.
[1] I identified the 1,200 most recent posts with the hashtag #coronavirus. For each post, all tags were considered as having connections to each other. These connections were used to construct a social network analysis, and Gephi was used to determine which tags were frequently used in conjunction with each other.
[2] It should also be noted that many tags are included in multiple clusters.
