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

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

https://vimeo.com/iafor/59359

59359 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. Yu-Ning Chuang, University of Sheffield, United Kingdom

Uploaded 2020-12-28T01:54:44.000Z Aerials and Satellites Wakefield