Can we post our way out of the next pandemic?

By Cam Wilson

The relatively muted response to the World Health Organization’s declaration that the COVID-19 pandemic was over didn’t come as a big surprise to me. Anyone who works in digital media will tell you that most audiences are no longer interested in hearing anything about COVID-19, even as it continues to spread through our communities. (Despite that, I trust you’ll read the rest of this excellent edition of WebCam.)

But it’s not time to consign the pandemic to the memory books just yet. Now, with a bit of space, we can really start to understand the full impact of a once-in-a-hundred-years event and evaluate how we responded.

For example, a global pandemic was a new challenge for our relatively nascent social media information infrastructure. Suddenly, billions of social media users weren’t just using platforms to connect with friends or watch clips of popular movies split with Subway Surfer footage. Not to be dramatic, but getting out public health messages on social media was literally life or death.

So, how did we go? A new piece of research that came out of Sydney University’s Health Literacy Lab has begun to answer this. The paper’s authors looked at how Australian state and territory health departments used Facebook, Instagram and TikTok to reach young Australians during the Delta outbreak in 2021. They evaluated everything from the platform used, whether a social media post included images or video, and even breaking down whether they used so-called “social media techniques” like humour, memes or featuring celebrities and influencers. Using engagement as a rough proxy for interest and reach, they measured what kinds of posts popped off and what flopped.