This blog covers the influence of social media on the current pandemic, Covid-19, the ethical and moral responsibility of social media and guidelines to elude fake information.

As it is rightly said, “With great power comes great responsibility.”

Today this great responsibility lies in the hands of social media. Social media has impacted all facets of our lives. It has influenced the way we think, eat, drink, and travel. It has long taken over the print media. According to Statista, as of 2020, India, with around 280 million Indian users, is the largest Facebook user base in the world. The overall share of Indian population that has access to social media is growing and is expected to be around 31% by 2023 with around 450 million social media users. The power of social media is such that even the Prime Minister, Mr. Narendra Modi has turned to it to disseminate important information. Be it his constant reminders of keeping safe during the pandemic or the information about the development of the vaccine, Mr. Modi has always taken the aid of twitter.

Social media has come to the rescue of the governments of various countries for distributing information to large number of stakeholders. The Indonesian government agencies used Twitter to convey early warning communications with people during the 2012 Tsunami. The United States government officials used Twitter during the 2012 Hurricane Sandy crisis to involve people in the creation of public services.

But it is not all merry stories. Because of its popularity it is also a major source of spreading misinformation. According to a study conducted at MIT, false news stories are 70% more likely to be retweeted than true stories and true stories take about six times as long to reach about 1,500 people as does the false information to the same number of people. An example of misinformation is that in 2014, during the Ebola outbreak there were a number of tweets stating that the cases increased to 6,000 per minute and that the virus spread through water and food, which led to panic amongst people. It happened when there were only few cases in Newark, Miami and Washington DC.

Now a new novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has spread to almost all the countries of the world and has become a pandemic. The number of cases are rising every day.

          Global new cases everyday

                          *Graph from New York Times

The stark difference between this pandemic and many before can largely be attributed to the presence of social media. Every person at each time is aware of the number of positive cases in each and every district. The source of information is sometimes validated while sometimes it is a complete faux. Soon after the world got used to the term covid-19, the WHO coined another, more deadly, term “Infodemic”. It is the rapid spread of deceptive or counterfeited news spread through various channels like, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and many more. This avalanche of misinformation is highly contagious like the virus and what more, even more deadlier than the virus itself. Covid-19, or corona (as it is commonly called) is, in fact, the first social media pandemic.

Basch et al. in a study (5^th March 2020) revealed that the 100 most viewed videos (together comprising 165 million views) on YouTube related to the word “coronavirus” and found that 85% of them were news videos. The study found that 90% comments were related to deaths, anxiety and quarantine status. Less than half of them mentioned most frequent symptoms and less than one third mentioned the recommended preventive steps.

In India the situation is far more complex. There is a huge gap amongst people who have access to social media and can use it to spread information and fabricated news and people who don’t even have access to basic internet. According to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, there were about 34 internet subscribers per 100 people in India in 2017, which grew by 20% in just two years. Now in 2020, India is the second largest online market in the world, second to only China. But this internet connectivity is not evenly distributed. As with most of the modern facilities, here too, urban rural divide exists. According to CSC e-Governance Services India Ltd, only 290 million of the 600 million people are from rural areas. The internet density in rural India, which accounts for 66% of the total population, is only 5% whereas, for the urban India (which accounts for 34% of the total population), it is a whopping 98%! Also, there are far more male users as compared to the female users. This gender divide deepens as we go further in the rural heartlands.