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

Olutobi Akingbade
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引用次数: 0

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.
大流行病期间社交媒体的使用、不信任和(错误)信息:尼日利亚年轻人与新冠肺炎公共卫生信息的互动研究
本研究通过对一组有意招募的尼日利亚年轻人主要通过社交媒体消费公共卫生信息的看法进行调查,有助于对COVID-19大流行的跨学科理解。该研究采用焦点小组讨论和深度访谈的方式,征求了11名年龄在21岁至24岁之间的年轻人的意见,他们居住在尼日利亚商业首都拉各斯的低收入社区Ajegunle。该研究确定了社交媒体平台对受访者意义生成过程的中心地位,并借鉴了Hall(1980)的编码/解码模型,以突出他们对公共卫生信息的对立解释。该研究还确定了受访者对COVID-19现实的不同程度的不相信,他们对政府官员传达和执行对抗大流行的决定的不信任,以及他们消费和传播的社交媒体信息成为错误信息渠道的倾向。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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