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Side effect of COVID-19: Increase in social media consumption

I recently stumbled on an article that has collected data on people's increasing social media and digital consumption. In the article we can see that everyone has increased their consumption, regardless of what that consumption means--this is obvious as people now have more free time. In addition to that, the article provides really fun infographics that breaks down their data. In particular, I was interested in the infographic that showed how trustworthy people view certain mediums of news. Thankfully, we see that only on average 17% find news from social media being trust-worthy. Although 17% is a good chunk, compared to the higher mediums like government websites (49%) and WHO's website (61%), the chunk is relatively low. However, they are the two highest, I would expect those two sources to be closer to 80-90%, and it makes me wonder why that is. I think the reasoning is because a lot of people are actually feeding into the mentality that COVID-19 is not as serious of an issue as described which makes them not believe these official sources. This can be indicated by social media campaigns gaining followers such as Operation Gridlock which started and blew up over social media. This caused streets to be blocked and people disobeying stay-at-home orders because they feel COVID-19 is not dangerous. I wonder if earlier prevention by social media companies could have resulted in these campaigns to not come into fruition. However, at the same time, by silencing voices, even if they are wrong, ethical issues and conundrums arrive.




- By: Usman Toor

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