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Perceptions of blame on social media during the coronavirus pandemic
The outbreak of the coronavirus (COVID-19) disease is overwhelming resources, economies and countries around the world. Millions of people have been infected and hundreds of thousands have succumbed to the virus. Research regarding the coronavirus pandemic is published every day. However, there is l...
Autores principales: | , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Elsevier Ltd.
2021
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8175992/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34103785 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2021.106895 |
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author | Choli, Marilena Kuss, Daria J. |
author_facet | Choli, Marilena Kuss, Daria J. |
author_sort | Choli, Marilena |
collection | PubMed |
description | The outbreak of the coronavirus (COVID-19) disease is overwhelming resources, economies and countries around the world. Millions of people have been infected and hundreds of thousands have succumbed to the virus. Research regarding the coronavirus pandemic is published every day. However, there is limited discourse regarding societal perception. Thus, this paper examines blame attribution concerning the origin and propagation of the coronavirus crisis according to public perception. Specifically, data were extracted from the social media platform Twitter concerning the coronavirus during the early stages of the outbreak and further investigated using thematic analysis. The findings revealed the public predominantly blames national governments for the coronavirus pandemic. In addition, the results documented the explosion of conspiracy theories among social media users regarding the virus’ origin. In the early stages of the pandemic, the blame tendency was most frequent to conspiracy theories and restriction of information from the government, whilst in the later months, responsibility had shifted to political leaders and the media. The findings indicate an emerging government mistrust that may result in disregard of preventive health behaviours and the amplification of conspiracy theories, and an evolving dynamic of blame. This study argues for a transparent, continuing dialogue between governments and the public to stop the spread of the coronavirus. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-8175992 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2021 |
publisher | Elsevier Ltd. |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-81759922021-06-04 Perceptions of blame on social media during the coronavirus pandemic Choli, Marilena Kuss, Daria J. Comput Human Behav Article The outbreak of the coronavirus (COVID-19) disease is overwhelming resources, economies and countries around the world. Millions of people have been infected and hundreds of thousands have succumbed to the virus. Research regarding the coronavirus pandemic is published every day. However, there is limited discourse regarding societal perception. Thus, this paper examines blame attribution concerning the origin and propagation of the coronavirus crisis according to public perception. Specifically, data were extracted from the social media platform Twitter concerning the coronavirus during the early stages of the outbreak and further investigated using thematic analysis. The findings revealed the public predominantly blames national governments for the coronavirus pandemic. In addition, the results documented the explosion of conspiracy theories among social media users regarding the virus’ origin. In the early stages of the pandemic, the blame tendency was most frequent to conspiracy theories and restriction of information from the government, whilst in the later months, responsibility had shifted to political leaders and the media. The findings indicate an emerging government mistrust that may result in disregard of preventive health behaviours and the amplification of conspiracy theories, and an evolving dynamic of blame. This study argues for a transparent, continuing dialogue between governments and the public to stop the spread of the coronavirus. Elsevier Ltd. 2021-11 2021-06-04 /pmc/articles/PMC8175992/ /pubmed/34103785 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2021.106895 Text en © 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Since January 2020 Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The COVID-19 resource centre is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier hereby grants permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre - including this research content - immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active. |
spellingShingle | Article Choli, Marilena Kuss, Daria J. Perceptions of blame on social media during the coronavirus pandemic |
title | Perceptions of blame on social media during the coronavirus pandemic |
title_full | Perceptions of blame on social media during the coronavirus pandemic |
title_fullStr | Perceptions of blame on social media during the coronavirus pandemic |
title_full_unstemmed | Perceptions of blame on social media during the coronavirus pandemic |
title_short | Perceptions of blame on social media during the coronavirus pandemic |
title_sort | perceptions of blame on social media during the coronavirus pandemic |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8175992/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34103785 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2021.106895 |
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