Social media can be a force for good in a crisis: lessons from Lagos
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Loading... - Frank Elumelu
- 09 Jun 2022
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In times of crisis, it is especially crucial that governments share accurate, up to date information with their citizens. Social media can play an important role in disseminating urgent information.
At its simplest, for instance, it allows people to mark themselves as “safe” after natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, or during terrorist attacks and insurgencies.
Social media platforms can also be used to share critically important information about disaster management. And it’s a powerful tool for authorities to tackle misinformation and disinformation that may arise.
This sort of communication is becoming ever more important. The Covid-19 pandemic has particularly highlighted how vulnerable densely populated cities and urban areas are in responding to and navigating disasters and emergencies.
This is especially true in densely populated cities on the African continent. Many of these cities lack large infrastructure and reliable service provision. These issues, alongside under-equipped local and national authorities, mean cities struggle to absorb and adapt to crises as they unfold in real time.
We set out to assess the role that social media played in driving public engagement with Covid health measures in Lagos, Nigeria. We analysed public engagement on Twitter between January and August 2020 that related to the city’s lockdown protocols.
One of our key findings was that the public responded most to public health information being shared by prominent individual social media influencers. These included sportspeople, comedians, musicians and business-people.
It was also clear that people responded most positively to the use of satire, humour and messaging that drew on influencers’ everyday lived experiences of the lockdown.
Traditional survey methods are unavoidably subject to time lags. That negates cities’ real-time or near-real time responses to disasters. As our research shows, social media enables authorities and researchers to collect a vast swathe of nuanced, contextual data in near real-time. That can be used to ensure messaging campaigns respond quickly to public concerns.
These findings offer useful insights for future emergencies and disasters. Of course, social media does not adequately currently represent society as a whole. But it is – and should be – regarded as a valuable supplementary tool for public health and other public interest practitioners who seek to ensure that public responses to disasters are successful.
Key findings
Modern market research tools mean researchers can now analyse important metrics on topics that are making an impact both globally and closer to home, almost in real time. These tools create data visualisations and summarise key insights, so researchers can quickly access a structured set of data to extract rich, useful information on any topic.
We used the commercially available Brandwatch platform for this research. The date range – January to August 2020 – allowed us to find and compare data from Lagos’s pre-lockdown, lockdown, easing and post-lockdown phases.
For context, national responses to the pandemic were guided by a continent-wide strategy. The overarching strategy was implemented differently in various countries and along different timelines according to their contextual specificities and needs. The strategy acknowledged that lockdowns come with issues, including people not seeking healthcare for other conditions. Other unintended harmful effects of lockdowns include increasing food insecurity, reducing physical activity and loss of livelihoods. Read More…
