Background
Health promotion is an effective tool for public health. It goes beyond preventing the spread of diseases and reducing the disease burden. It includes interventions encompassing the creation of supportive environments, building public health policy, developing personal skills, reorienting health services and strengthening multisectoral community actions.
Aim
The aim of the review was conduct an analysis on the opportunities and challenges of the use of social media for health promotion in South Africa.
Methods
A search of review articles on health promotion using social media conducted using Medline and Google Scholar. Secondary searches were conducted using references and citations from selected articles.
Results
Social media has potential of being an effective health promotion tool in South Africa. It presents an opportunity for scaling health promotion programs because of its low cost, its ability to have virtual communities and the ease of access eliminating geographical barriers. It also allows real-time communication between various stakeholders. It allows information to spread far and fast and leaving irrespective of the credibility of the source of information. There is a need to take into account country specific socio-economic issues, which may perpetuate unintended consequences related to the digital divide, data costs and the varying levels of health literacy.
Conclusion
Considering the opportunities presented by social media, the National Department of Health needs to review its health promotion strategy and include the use of social media as an enabler. They also need to address to explore intersectoral measures to address issues which threatening equitable access to credible health promotion information.
South Africa has had a long history of institutionalized racial segregation and although it came to an end in the early 1990s, the level of power, racial and inequalities are still evident to date, making South Africa one of the most unequal societies in the world. Kenya, on the other hand, has had its share of inequalities, particularly inclined towards political and ethnic dimensions. The emergence of COVID-19 has further uncovered social and political fractures within the two societies with racialized and discriminatory responses to fear disproportionately affecting marginalized groups. Using qualitative research design, and case study approach, a corpus of tweets from social media archive (Twitter) when the first COVID-19 cases were recorded in both countries were analysed to ascertain the conversations occurring and if it re-enforces existing postcolonial issues. The study argued that Twitter conversations that occurred in both countries show that postcolonial issues of power and race are rife and appeared in many public conversations on social media.
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