The nature, cause and consequence of COVID-19 panic among social media users in India

• Published in: Social network analysis and mining Vol. 11; no. 1; p. 53
• Main Authors: Bhattacharya, Chandrima, Chowdhury, Debaroti, Ahmed, Nova, Özgür, Su, Bhattacharya, Bodhisatwa, Mridha, Sankar Kumar, Bhattacharyya, Malay
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Vienna Springer Vienna 2021; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Age groups; Anxiety; Applications of Graph Theory and Complex Networks; Computer Science; COVID-19; Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery; Demography; Digital media; Disease transmission; Economic conditions; Economic structure; Economics; False information; First aid; Game Theory; Health care; Humanities; Law; Mental health; Mental states; Methodology of the Social Sciences; Original; Original Article; Pandemics; Panic; Panic attacks; Sentiment analysis; Social and Behav. Sciences; Social media; Social networks; Special Issue on Tackling COVID-19 Infodemic; Statistics for Social Sciences; Tagging; Viral diseases; India; COVID-19; Panic; Anxiety; Social media; Mental health
• ISSN: 1869-5450; 1869-5469
• DOI: 10.1007/s13278-021-00750-2

The recent pandemic of COVID-19 has not only shaken the healthcare but also economic structure around the world. In addition to these direct effects, it has also brought in some indirect difficulties owing to the information epidemic (hereafter termed as infodemic) on social media. We aimed to understand the nature of panic social media users in India are experiencing due to the flow of (mis)information. We further extend this investigation to other countries. We performed a cross-sectional study on 1075 social media users from India and 29 other countries. This revealed a significant increase in social media usage and the rise of panic (symbolizing a sense of alarm and/or fear) over time in India. Several of these behaviors are unique to social media users in India possibly because of later outbreak of COVID-19 and a prolonged uninterrupted lockdown. The amount of social media usage might not be causal but has a significant role in generating panic among the people in India. As multiple countries are entering into the second phase of lockdown, this study focused on India might provide a unique perspective of how various factors, including infodemic, affect the mental state of individuals around the globe.