The Networked Narratives of Ebola: Communicating the Meaning of Epidemics on Social Media

• In Event: Social Media, Public Health, and Mental Health

Abstract

Abstract
In this paper, we analyze the narrative strategies employed by two public health organizations as part of their social media response to the Ebola epidemic. Building on current research on social media for health, and the body of writing on epidemics as “moral panics”, we present a thematic analysis of the official Facebook pages of the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in the wake of the first “Epidemic2.0”: fundamentally shaped by the social web. Using as our corpus all the messages on these pages between the period of July 1 and October 15, 2014, we shift in narrativizing of Ebola risk from a) consulting and containment, to b) an international concern, and c) the possibility an epidemic in the US. In a second part of our analysis, we also provide a quantification of user engagement generated by Ebola-related posts on the official Facebook pages.

Authors

• Shaunak Sastry, University of Cincinnati

• Alessandro Lovari, Universita' degli Studi di Sassari