RESEARCH ON THE IMPACT OF INTERNET MEDIA ON EPIDEMIC PREVENTION AND CONTROL

Abstract

At the beginning of 2020, COVID-19 broke out. After the COVID-19 outbreak, online media became an important channel for the masses to obtain information about the epidemic. According to the different social functions of various online media, this paper classifies the important online media in this epidemic into four categories, namely, official media, government media, market-oriented media and We-media. By using the crawler software tool, crawling the Weibo data of the People’s Daily, The Paper, Healthy China, and Doctor Do of Concord, from January 1, 2020, to March 1, 2020, combined with the data of confirmed cases of the domestic novel coronavirus epidemic in the same period, constructed a multiple regression model to conduct empirical research on the effects of online media on different subjects. The research results show that official new media and market-based media are negatively correlated with the number of people infected with the epidemic, whereas government media are more inclined to reflect the law of the development of the epidemic and are positively correlated with the development of the epidemic. Therefore, taking the initiative to grasp the public opinion guidance of the official media and market-oriented media can achieve better publicity effect in the epidemic prevention and control work.