Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Apr 13, 2020
Date Accepted: May 12, 2020
Date Submitted to PubMed: Jun 10, 2020
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Measuring the Outreach Efforts of Public Health Authorities and the Public Response in Facebook during the COVID-19 Outbreak in Early 2020: A Cross-Country Study with Singapore, United States of America, and United Kingdom
ABSTRACT
Background:
The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak presents one of the most challenging global crisis at the dawn of a new decade. Public health authorities (PHA) are increasingly adopting the use of social media such as Facebook to rapidly communicate and disseminate outbreak response measures to the public. Understanding of communication strategies across different PHAs and the examining the publics’ response on the social media landscapes can inform best practices in conveying information to the public.
Objective:
This study examines COVID-19 related outreach efforts of PHAs in Singapore (SG), United States of America (US) and United Kingdom (UK) and the corresponding public response to these outreach efforts in Facebook.
Methods:
Posts and comments from the Facebook pages of Ministry of Healthcare (MOH) in SG, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in US and Public Health England (PHE) in UK, were extracted from January 1st, 2019 to March 18th, 2020. Posts published before Jan 1st, 2020 were categorized as pre-COVID-19 while the remaining posts were categorized as peri-COVID-19 posts. COVID-19 related posts were identified and classified into themes. Metrics used for measuring outreach and engagement were frequency, mean posts per day (PPD), mean reactions per post (RPP), mean shares per post (SPP) and mean comments per post (CPP). The public response for the COVID-19 posts were measured using frequency, mean sentiment polarity (SP), positive to negative sentiments ratio (PNSR) and positive to negative emotions ratio (PNER). Toxicity in comments were identified and analyzed using frequency, mean likes per toxic comment (LPTC) and mean replies per toxic comment (RPTC). Trend analysis was performed to examine how the metrics vary with key events such as when COVID-19 was declared a pandemic.
Results:
MOH publishes more COVID-19 posts (n=271, PPD=5.0) compared to CDC (n=94, PPD=2.2) and PHE (n=45, PPD=1.4). The mean number of comments per post was highest for CDC (CPP=298.3) compared to MOH (CPP=20.7) and PHE (CPP=11.5). Six major themes were identified, with posts about preventive/safety measures and situation updates being prevalent across the three countries. The themes of MOH’s posts were diverse while CDC and PHE posts focused on a few themes. The number of comments spiked alongside key events. Public sentiments for MOH’s COVID-19 posts were largely negative initially but improved over time. Overall, public sentiments for MOH posts (PNSR=0.9) was more favorable compared to public sentiments for CDC (PNSR=0.6) and PHE (PNSR=0.6) posts. Toxic comments were rare (0.1%) across all PHAs.
Conclusions:
PHAs’ extent of Facebook usage for outreach purposes during COVID-19 outbreak varied among the three PHAs, highlighting the strategies and approach other PHAs can potentially adopt. Our study showed that social media analysis is capable of assessing the effect of communication efforts by PHAs.
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Copyright
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