The Contributions of Social Media in COVID-19 Awareness: A Systematic Review

Okwudili-Okpala Obianuju Lilian, Dharmendra Kumar Dubey

Abstract: Coronavirus is an infectious disease of public health concern. There is a need for dissemination of timely and accurate information to the public for proper awareness of the disease characteristics, prevention strategies and to discredit the erroneous information in circulation. Social media like Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube are often seen as fast and effective platforms of receiving information either by internationally searching or passively coming across the information. Studies have shown that social media dependence as sources of COVID-19 information and awareness creation increased more than dependence on conventional media during the initial period of the pandemic. The role of social media in information dissemination and awareness creation cannot be over emphasized. Objectives: The main objective of this article is to systematically review studies that investigated the role of social media in creation of COVID 19 awareness among the public and how much they trusted social media information. Material and Methods: Publicly available studies on PubMed websites, online journals and other science websites were searched for studies between late 2019 to 2021. A total of 2290 studies relating to this review topic were found, after screening based on their title, abstract and duplicates, 70 studies were selected for full text screening and 22studies were selected for the review based on inclusion criteria. ?Yes? or ?Not reported? was used in this review to indicate roles found in each of the studies. Each of the studies covered a wide range of topics on the role of social media in covid-19 awareness creation, for this review they were articulated under three terms: ?Social media exposure for covid-19 awareness, misinformation tool and the mental impact associated with the awareness. Results: The total sample size ranges from 128 to 6329, Mean 1480.43, Interquartile range 1617 (Q1= 378, Q3=1995) and median. The systematic study reported high social media exposure for covid-19 awareness (86.36%), 22.72% of misinformation and 40.90% of emotional and mental impact.

Keywords: COVID-19, SARS COV2, social media, Social Platform, Awareness, Exposure, Information, Role and Influence