COVID-19, Genetics, and Risk: Content Analysis of Facebook Posts Early in the Coronavirus Pandemic

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic represented a unique information seeking and sharing context for billions of Internet users across the globe. Although previous research has established that people often seek health information on the Internet, including through social media platforms, there was a political element to pandemic responses that is not typical of health issues such as seasonal influenza or heart conditions. This unique context, in conjunction with the public posting of the novel coronavirus DNA by Chinese scientists in January 2020, begs for analysis of how people used social media in the early phase of the pandemic to make sense of the role of genetics in COVID-19. This study represents such an analysis as a qualitative content analysis of Facebook posts concerning genetics and COVID-19. Data were collected from March through August of 2020 to identify how genetics issues were being shared on Facebook and the types of accounts that were sharing that information. Through analysis, four themes emerged representing Facebook posts about genetics and COVID-19: disease risk, testing, vaccines, and virus characteristics. These posts appeared on eight types of accounts, with five of those representing 88% of the data: education, health, lifestyle, news, and political. Results are interpreted with constructs from media dependency theory and implications for future research are presented.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Percent agreement was chosen over Cohen’s Kappa due to the large number of posts, categories, and account types.

Additional information

Funding

Research reported in this publication was supported by Utah Center for Excellence in ELSI Research (UCEER). UCEER is supported by the National Human Genome Research Institute of the National Institutes of Health under [Award Number RM1HG009037]. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.