People’s Perspectives on Social Media Use during COVID-19 Pandemic

In this paper, we explore people's perceptions and usage of social media during the COVID-19 pandemic, and how it had changed compared to the pre-pandemic times. As salient findings, we report increased activity in social media, which followed both from the increased opportunity to spend time in social media, the need to be socially connected, and the motivation to follow pandemic related updates. The perceived emerging content visible in social media postings were face masks, home and outdoors activities, remote events, and different challenges. Social media also made people aware of the divided opinions related to the pandemic, and could lead to more careful self-censoring of own postings. Our study is based on interviews of 29 and online survey of 172 people.