The Role of Social Media in Health Communication: Implications for Coronavirus Disease

Abstract

As the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic around the world, which have highlighted the power of social media. The media has a significant agenda-setting role in health communications (e.g. Eysenbach, G. 2008; Chou, W.Y.S., Hunt, Y.M., Beckjord, E.B., Moser, R.P. and Hesse, B.W. 2009). Kamel Boulos and Wheeler (2007) emphasized the social media plays an enabler in health communication for organizations, clinicians, patients and laypersons. In this paper, I observe the news representation of COVID-19 and how the reporters play the role in sustainable education on health communication. In this paper, I collect the COVID-19 news during the COVID-19 period (March 13–April 21st) and the pre-COVID-19 period (January 8th-March 12th) in the top five popular news pages in Facebook in Taiwan and then access the content analysis. In preliminary observation, the news performance of pre-COVID-19 in Taiwan is similar to German (Quand, Boberg, Schatto-Eckrodt and Frischlich 2020), which represents that the social media plays a main approach in providing the knowledge of COVID-19 and spreading panic at the same time. And reflects the structure changing of the Facebook coverage from lack of coverage to a broad range of coverage on Corona-related issues and societal concerns. Along with new media developments, it is necessary to understand the news performance of the COVID-19 on Facebook, which will be of benefit to improve sustainable education on health communication.



Author Information
Yu-Ning Chuang, University of Sheffield, United Kingdom

Paper Information
Conference: IICSEEHawaii2021
Stream: Education

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Posted by James Alexander Gordon