Emergency preparedness during the COVID-19 pandemic: Modelling the roles of social media with fuzzy DEMATEL and analytic network process.

While the utility of social media has been widely recognized in the current literature, minimal effort has been made to further the analysis of their roles on disruptive events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. To address this gap, this work comprehensively identifies the 16 prevalent social media roles in disaster preparedness during the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, an integrated fuzzy decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (FDEMATEL) and analytic network process (ANP), hereby termed the FDANP methodology, is used to perform the causal analysis of social media roles and to systemically measure the priority of these roles in emergency preparedness. Among the identified roles, those considered top priority are social media roles concerned with the facilitation of public health policy development, prevention of misinformation, and management of public behavior and response. These results were found to be robust, as evidenced by the sensitivity analysis. The implications of these findings were also detailed in this work in the context of a developing country.