Social Media Use, Disbelief and (Mis)information During a Pandemic: An Examination of Young Adult Nigerians’ Interactions with COVID-19 Public Health Messaging

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.23962/10539/32215

Keywords:

COVID-19, Pandemic, Public health, Social media, Media messages, Codes, Encoding, Decoding, Disbelief, Misinformation, Young adults, Nigeria, Lagos, Ajegunle

Abstract

This study contributes to transdisciplinary understanding of the COVID-19 pandemic through an examination of perceptions of public health messages as consumed primarily through social media by a purposively enlisted set of young adult Nigerians. The research used focus group discussions and in-depth interviews to elicit the views of 11 young adults, aged 21 to 24, resident in Ajegunle, a low-income community in Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital. The study identifies the centrality of social media platforms to the respondents’ processes of meaning-making, and draws on Hall’s (1980) encoding/decoding model in order to bring to the fore their oppositional interpretations of public health messages. The study also identifies respondents’ varying levels of disbelief about the realities of COVID-19, their mistrust of the government officials conveying and enforcing decisions to combat the pandemic, and the propensity for the social media messages they consume and propagate to serve as channels of misinformation.

References

Akingbade, O. (2017). Negotiating the line between information and panic: A case study of Vanguard’s coverage of the Ebola outbreak in Nigeria. Master’s dissertation, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa. http://vital.seals.ac.za:8080/vital/access/manager/Repository/vital:20986?site_name=GlobalView

Akingbade, O. (2018). Epidemics, fears and the mass media: An analysis of the 2014 Ebola virus disease outbreak in Nigeria. Journal of Communication and Media Research, 10(2), 139–148.

Allgaier, J., & Svalastog, A. L. (2015). The communication aspects of the Ebola virus disease outbreak in Western Africa – Do we need to counter one, two, or many epidemics? Croatian Medical Journal, 56(5), 496–499. https://doi.org/10.3325/cmj.2015.56.496

Amukele, T., & Barbhuiya, M. (2020, July 12). African countries need cheaper COVID-19 tests: Here’s how to get them. https://theconversation.com/african-countries-needcheaper-covid-19-tests-heres-how-to-get-them-141315

Andrews, J. L., Foulkes, L., & Blakemore, S. J. (2020). Peer influence in adolescence: Public-health implications for COVID-19. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 24(8), 585–587. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2020.05.001

Babbie, E., & Mouton, J. (2001). The practices of social research. Oxford University Press.

Barker, C., & Jane, E. A. (2016). Cultural studies: Theory and practice. Sage.

Bursztyn, L., Rao, A., Roth, C., & Yanagizawa-Drott, D. (2020). Misinformation during a pandemic. Becker Friedman Institute for Economics Working Paper (2020-44), University of Chicago. https://doi.org/10.3386/w27417

Cantor, J. (2002). Fright reactions to mass media. Media effects: Advances in theory and research, 2(2), 287–306.

Chan, M. (2014). Ebola virus disease in West Africa—no early end to the outbreak. New England Journal of Medicine, 371(13), 1183–1185. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMp1409859

Ciampaglia, G. L. (2018). Fighting fake news: A role for computational social science in the fight against digital misinformation. Journal of Computational Social Science, 1(1), 147–153. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42001-017-0005-6

Clarke, J. N., & Everest, M. M. (2006). Cancer in the mass print media: Fear, uncertainty and the medical model. Social Science & Medicine, 62(10), 2591–2600.

Croteau, D., & Hoynes, W. (2014). Media/society: Industries, images, and audiences (5th ed.). Sage.

Cummins, E. (2020, March 24). A likely culprit in Covid-19 surges: People hell-bent on ignoring social distancing orders. https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2020/3/24/21191184/coronavirus-masks-social-distancing-memorial-day-pandemic-keep-calm-carry-on-fauci

Cunha, B. A. (2004). Influenza: Historical aspects of epidemics and pandemics. Infectious Disease Clinics, 18(1), 141–155. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0891-5520(03)00095-3

Deacon, D., Pickering, M., Murdock, A., & Golding, P. (1999). Researching communications: A practical guide to methods in media and cultural analysis. Arnold.

Depoux, A., Martin, S., Karafillakis, E., Preet, R., Wilder-Smith, A., & Larson, H. (2020). The pandemic of social media panic travels faster than the COVID-19 outbreak. Journal of Travel Medicine, 27(3), 1–2. https://doi.org/10.1093/jtm/taaa031

Drabble, L., Trocki, K. F., Salcedo, B., Walker, P. C., & Korcha, R. A. (2016). Conducting qualitative interviews by telephone: Lessons learned from a study of alcohol use among sexual minority and heterosexual women. Qualitative Social Work, 15(1), 118–133. https://doi.org/10.1177/1473325015585613

Farrell, T., Gorrell, G., & Bontcheva, K. (2020). Vindication, virtue and vitriol: A study of online engagement and abuse toward British MPs during the COVID-19 pandemic. Journal of Computational Social Science, 3, 401–443. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42001-020-00090-9

Ferrara, E., Cresci, S., & Luceri, L. (2020). Misinformation, manipulation, and abuse on social media in the era of COVID-19. Journal of Computational Social Science, 3(2), 271–277. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42001-020-00094-5

Fiske, J. (1987). Television culture. Routledge. Flaherty, C. (2020, May 26). Social scientists on COVID-19. Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/05/26/social-scientists-covid-19

Friedman, S. (2020, July 16). South Africa is failing on COVID-19 because its leaders want to emulate the First World. https://theconversation.com/south-africa-is-failing-oncovid-19-because-its-leaders-want-to-emulate-the-first-world-142732

Gautret, P., Lagier, J. C., Parola, P., Meddeb, L., Mailhe, M., Doudier, B., Courjon, J., Giordanengo, V., Vieira, V. E., Dupont, H. T., & Honoré, S. (2020). Hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin as a treatment of COVID-19: Results of an open-label non-randomized clinical trial. International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents, p. 105949. https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.03.16.20037135

Goode, E., & Ben-Yehuda, N. (2011). Grounding and defending the sociology of moral panic. In S. P. Hier (Ed.), Moral panic and the politics of anxiety (pp. 20–36). Routledge.

Grey, H. (2020, June 24). More young people are getting COVID-19: What that means for the outbreak. Healthline. https://www.healthline.com/health-news/more-youngpeople-are-getting-covid-19-what-that-means-for-the-outbreak

Guo, Y. R., Cao, Q. D., Hong, Z. S., Tan, Y. Y., Chen, S. D., Jin, H. J., Tan, K. S., Wang, D. Y., & Yan, Y. (2020). The origin, transmission and clinical therapies on coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak – An update on the status. Military Medical Research, 7(1), 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40779-020-00240-0

Hall, S. (1980). Encoding/decoding. In S. Hall, D. Hobson, A. Lowe, & P. Willis (Eds.), Culture, media, language (pp. 128–138). Hutchinson.

Hamann, R. (2020, July 3). Civil society groups that mobilised around COVID-19 face important choices. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/civil-societygroups-that-mobilised-around-covid-19-face-important-choices-140989.

Hansen, A., Cottle, S., Negrine, R., Newbold, C. & Halloran, J. (1998). Mass communication research methods. Macmillan.

Harvey, R. (2020, July 9). How COVID-19 is putting the rule of law to the test across Africa. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/how-covid-19-is-putting-the-ruleof-law-to-the-test-across-africa-142080

Hays, J. N. (2005). Epidemics and pandemics: Their impacts on human history. ABC-Clio.

Hoekstra, S. J., Harris, R. J., & Helmick, A. L. (1999). Autobiographical memories about the experience of seeing frightening movies in childhood. Media Psychology, 1(2), 117–140. https://doi.org/10.1207/s1532785xmep0102_2

Holmes, E. A., O’Connor, R. C., Perry, V. H., Tracey, I., Wessely, S., Arseneault, L., Ballard, C., Christensen, H., Silver, R.C., Everall, I., & Ford, T. (2020). Multidisciplinary research priorities for the COVID-19 pandemic: A call for action for mental health science. The Lancet Psychiatry, 7(6), 547–560. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2215-0366(20)30168-1

Janghorban, R., Roudsari, R. L., & Taghipour, A. (2014). Skype interviewing: The new generation of online synchronous interview in qualitative research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies on Health and Well-being, 9(1), 24152. https://doi.org/10.3402/qhw.v9.24152

Järvinen, J., Tollinen, A., Karjaluoto, H., & Jayawardhena, C. (2012). Digital and social media marketing usage in B2B industrial section. Marketing Management Journal, 22(2), 102–117.

Jordan, R. E., Adab, P., & Cheng, K. K. (2020). COVID-19: Risk factors for severe disease and death. BMJ. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.m1198

Kannan, K., & Hongshuang, A. L. (2017). Digital marketing: A framework, review and research agenda. International Journal of Research in Marketing, 34(1), 22–45. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijresmar.2016.11.006

Kapitan, S., & Silvera, D. H. (2016). From digital media influencers to celebrity endorsers: Attributions drive endorser effectiveness. Marketing Letters, 27(3), 553–567. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11002-015-9363-0

Kim, Y. (Ed.). (2008). Media consumption and everyday life in Asia. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203892480

Krueger, R. A., & Casey, M. A. (2014). Focus groups: A practical guide for applied research. Sage.

Lapin, T. (2020, June 30). Alabama students partied despite knowing they had coronavirus, officials say. New York Post.

Larson, H. J. (2018). The biggest pandemic risk? Viral misinformation. Nature, 562(7726), 309–310. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-07034-4

Lattanzi, M. (2008). Non-recent history of influenza pandemics, vaccines, and adjuvants. In R. Rappuoli, & G. Del Giudice (Eds.), Influenza vaccines for the future (pp. 245–259). Birkhäuser Basel. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7643-8371-8_11

Madrid-Morales, D., Wasserman, H., Gondwe, G., Ndlovu, K., Sikanku, E., Tulley, M., Umejei, E., & Uzuegbunam, C. (2021). Motivations for sharing misinformation: A comparative study in six sub-Saharan African countries. International Journal of Communication, 15, 1200–1219.

McCombs, M. (2002). The agenda-setting role of the mass media in the shaping of public opinion. Paper presented at London School of Economics and Political Science. http://sticerd.lse.ac.uk/dps/extra/McCombs.pdf

Metzler, K. (2020, April 18). What social science can offer us in a time of Covid-19 [Blog post]. Times Higher Education.

Morganstein, J. C., Fullerton, C. S., Ursano, R. J., Donato, D., & Holloway, H. C. (2017). Pandemics: Health care emergencies. In R. J. Ursano, C. S. Fullerton, L. Weisaeth, & B. Raphael (Eds.), Textbook of disaster psychiatry (2nd ed.) (pp. 270–283). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316481424.019

Murdock, G. (2017). Mediatisation and the transformation of capitalism: The elephant in the room. Javnost - The Public, Journal of the European Institute for Communication and Culture, 24(2), 119-135.

Nicholas, S., & O’Malley, T. (Eds.) (2013). Moral panics, social fears, and the media: Historical perspectives. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203386231

Oksanen, A., Kaakinen, M., Latikka, R., Savolainen, I., Savela, N., & Koivula, A. (2020). Regulation and trust: 3-month follow-up study on COVID-19 mortality in 25 European countries. JMIR Public Health and Surveillance, 6(2), e19218. https://doi.org/10.2196/19218

Recchi, E., Ferragina, E., Helmeid, E., Pauly, S., Safi, M., Sauger, N., & Schradie, J. (2020). The “eye of the hurricane” paradox: An unexpected and unequal rise of well-being during the Covid-19 lockdown in France. Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, 68, 100508. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rssm.2020.100508

Riaz, S. (2008). Agenda setting role of mass media. Global Media Journal, 1(2), 2070–2469.

Rothan, H. A., & Byrareddy, S. N. (2020). The epidemiology and pathogenesis of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak. Journal of Autoimmunity, 109, 1–4. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaut.2020.102433

Schroder, K., Drotner, K., Kline, S., & Murray, C. (2003). Researching audiences. Arnold.

Seale, C. (2002). Media and health. Sage.

Seymour, B., Getman, R., Saraf, A., Zhang, L. H., & Kalenderian, E. (2015). When advocacy obscures accuracy online: Digital pandemics of public health misinformation through an antifluoride case study. American Journal of Public Health, 105(3), 517–523. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2014.302437

Smith, J. A., Flower, P., Tindall, L., & Larkin, M. (2009). Interpretative phenomenological analysis: Theory, method and research. Sage.

Singhal, T. (2020). A review of coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19). The Indian Journal of Pediatrics, 87, 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12098-020-03263-6

Statista. (2020). Demographics of Nigeria.

Stringer, B., Alcayna, T., Caleo, G., Carrion-Martin, I., Froud, A., Gray, N., Keating, P., Kuehne, A., Lenglet, A., Stellmach, D., & De Jong, A. (2020). Exploring the perceptions of communities toward the impact novel Coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2), COVID-19 outbreak and response can have on their lives and security. Multisite qualitative assessment protocol. Médecins Sans Frontières.

Takahashi, T. (2009). Audience studies: A Japanese perspective (Vol. 5). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203871980

Thompson, J. B. (1995). The media and modernity: A social theory of the media. Polity Press.

Velavan, T. P., & Meyer, C. G. (2020). The COVID‐19 epidemic. Tropical Medicine & International Health, 25(3), 278–280. https://doi.org/10.1111/tmi.13383

World Health Organisation (WHO) (n.d.). WHO coronavirus disease (COVID-19) dashboard. https://covid19.who.int/

WHO. (2020). Key messages and actions for COVID-19 prevention and control in schools. https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/key-messagesand-actions-for-covid-19-prevention-and-control-in-schools-march-2020.pdf?sfvrsn=baf81d52_4

Willems, W. (2020). Beyond platform-centrism and digital universalism: The relational affordances of mobile social media publics. Information, Communication & Society, 24(12), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2020.1718177

Williams, K. (2013). Moral panics, emotion and newspaper history. In S. Nicholas, & T. O’Malley (Eds.), Moral panics, social fears, and the media: Historical perspectives (pp. 28–45). Routledge.

Xu, X., & Pratt, S. (2018). Social media influencers as endorsers to promote travel destinations: An application of self-congruence theory to the Chinese Generation Y. Journal of Travel & Tourism Marketing, 35(7), 958–972. https://doi.org/10.1080/10548408.2018.1468851

Downloads

Published

06-12-2021

Issue

Section

Research Articles

How to Cite

“Social Media Use, Disbelief and (Mis)information During a Pandemic: An Examination of Young Adult Nigerians’ Interactions with COVID-19 Public Health Messaging” (2021) The African Journal of Information and Communication (AJIC) [Preprint], (28). doi:10.23962/10539/32215.
Views
  • Abstract 1679
  • PDF 387