COVID-19 information dissemination via social media: Content analysis of Instagram posts during the COVID-19 outbreak

Social media platforms provide easy access to an unprecedented volume of information which could influence the awareness and perception of people during public health crises. The current study aims to explore the trends and content of the posts on Instagram.

We performed a retrospective content analysis of available public messages posted on Instagram. We collected data between 23 January 2020 and 25 March 2020. The inclusion criteria included an Instagram post with a hashtag related to Coronavirus (i.e. # “Corona” and # “Coronavirus”, in the Persian language). Persian hashtags were used for retrieving posts. All posts were categorized into seven categories. We performed descriptive statistics with Microsoft Excel 2019 and SPSS version 26.

A total of 4280 posts were extracted, out of which 1281 were categorized into seven main categories including News (n=205, 26.7%), Criticism (n=136, 17.7%), Education (n=112, 14.6%), Coronavirus’s impact on the healthcare system (n=100, 13%), Combating Coronavirus (n=98, 12.8%), Coronavirus’s impact on society (n=89, 11.6%), Joke (n=28, 3.6%).

Our findings revealed that the trend of posts on social media was influenced by factors such as the nature of the information sources as well as social and political occasions. This study provides insight into health dissemination on social media for future responses to public health crises.