COVID-19 NON-PHARMACEUTICAL INTERVENTIONS (NPI) MESSAGES ON THE SOCIAL MEDIA: USERS’ PERCEPTION AND RESPONSES
Authors:
Ukwueze, Cornelius Aghadiegwu, Phd, Okafor, Ekene Godfrey & Ekwugha, Uchenna Patricia, Phd
Abstract:
The COVID-19 Pandemic remains one of the global health crisis in the era of social media with countless instances of use of the platforms to spread all forms of its related information. Since the global outbreak and the ravaging effects of the pandemic, social media platforms, (especially Facebook and WhatsApp) had been inundated with divergent, exaggerated and oftentimes controversial information on the Non-pharmaceutical Interventions (NPI), recommended as part of measures to curtail the virus spread. Perhaps, owing to the carelessness and user-friendliness of the platforms, some of these Intervention messages are being debated and shared which could give rise to doubts, confusion and controversies among receivers. It, therefore, becomes pertinent to interrogate the perception and responses of active social media users to these Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions messages on social media sites amidst other contradictory and controversial information available to them on the platforms; how any form of doubts or controversies arise within them in the process and how their cognitions about these interventions may have been altered in the process. These will help determine how the platforms contribute towards shaping their level of acceptance or otherwise of these interventions. The study employed Survey and Focus Group Discussions to examine the responses and perception of the active social media users in South-East Nigeria to the COVID-19 Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPI) messages on these platforms. A sample size of 500 active social media users for a survey and 4 participants each for FGD were selected from 3 out of the 5 States in South-East Nigeria. It was found that the respondents perceive the COVID-19 Non-pharmaceutical Intervention messages on the social media to be attracting sentiments and spread of unverified information, and the social media to be conveying contrasting details about the NPI which do not account for their less frequent compliance to these NPI messages. They comply with the NPIs but less frequently and not exclusively because the social media presented them but rather environmental changes, and considering presentations made from other media sources where only a few of them, doubt the efficacy of the NPI messages and harbor some doubts about COVID-19. The study concludes that social media is ideal for instantaneous information transfer during a pandemic and that the NPI messages on the platforms hardly arouse the interest of users in South East because such messages had been existing overtime on various media of communication.