Social Media and the COVID-19: South African and Zimbabwean Netizens’ Response to a Pandemic

Abstract

Since the end of 2019, the world faced a major health crisis in the form of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. To mitigate the impact of the pandemic, governments across the globe instituted measures such as restricting local and international travel and in many cases, ordering citizens to stay indoors. Considering the social and economic impact of these restrictions it becomes crucial to investigate internet citizens’ (netizens) perception about the precautionary measures adopted. The study is anchored in the digital public sphere theory, which treats social media applications as virtual platforms where netizens commune to share ideas and debate about issues that affect them. Social media platforms already have critical public views on the current pandemic. However, the majority of this data is unstructured and difficult to interpret. Natural language processing (NLP), on the other hand, makes the task of gathering and analysing vast amounts of textual data feasible. Extracting structured knowledge from natural language, however, comes with unique challenges due to diverse linguistic properties including abbreviation, spelling mistakes, punctuations, stop words and non-standard text. In this work, The Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) algorithm was applied to tweeter data to extract topics discussed by netzens from Zimbabwe and South Africa. The primary focus of this paper, is to comparatively explore the variety of topics that occupied twitter communities from the two countries. We examine whether or not the national identities that define and differentiate citizens of these countries also exist on Twitter as evident in the emerging topics. Furthermore, this work investigated public opinion by analysing how citizens discuss the issues around the COVID-19 pandemic on social media

The role of social media during the COVID-19 pandemic: Salvaging its ‘power’ for positive social behaviour change in Africa

“…This is one example which helps to demonstrate how localised and globalised conspiracy narratives can be mutually reinforcing. 4 , 19 The same study 4 further shows that one of the events that generated a lot of interest on Twitter at the time was the pronouncement on television by French scientists Jean-Paul Mira and Camille Locht that the vaccine trials should be conducted on Africans. This saw a proliferation of comments on social media, especially from people of an African origin expressing their disappointment over the infamous proposal.…”

“…A study by Mutanga, Ureke, and Chani which used hashtags #COVID19SA, #CoronaVirusSA, #CoronaVirusZW, #Covid19Zim to evaluate the impact of social media in propagating the COVID-19 pandemic in South Africa and Zimbabwe has shown that international conspiracy scripts have increasingly been localized. 4 The study reveals that the words that featured prominently in tweets include “G5, “Vaccine”, “Africa”, “Bill Gates”, “Trust” and “microchip”. This is one example which helps to demonstrate how localised and globalised conspiracy narratives can be mutually reinforcing.…”

“… 2 COVID-19 has thus been dubbed ‘a digital pandemic’ 3 which has helped to create ‘internet citizens’ or ‘netizens’. 4 In this perspective, we discuss the growth of the social media industry and its impact during the COVID-19 crisis and how during the same era, public health practitioners and communications experts can harness the power of social media for communication for development.…”

People’s Perspectives on Covid 19, Fake News and the Vaccination Drive in South Africa

“…It is important to note from the onset that the public sphere refers to an imagined space that exists between the state and civil society. This space normally provides a platform for rational and diverse debates among citizens on issues that are of common interest to them [19]. The public sphere therefore serves provides opportunities for discursive interaction, which could at times be very critical of the state or any critical occurrence in the society, such as the advent and spread of COVID-19 as in the context of this chapter.…”

“…As noted earlier on in this chapter, countries and governments across the globe immediately put in measures such as restricting local and international travel as local and international borders were closed in most cases. Additionally, most countries resort to various levels of regional and national lockdown by ordering their citizens to stay indoors to reduce the spread and impact of the pandemic [18,19]. There were fears, frustrations, and speculations among South Africans just like in other parts of the world, more so as there was a growing level of mistrust around the source of the virus, the likelihood of a cure and the rising death toll globally.…”