Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, Brighton, United Kingdom.
Institut de Recherche pour le Développement, France and School of Health Sciences, Walden University, Columbia, MD, United States.
Front Public Health. 2023 Mar 29;11:1046404. doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2023.1046404. eCollection 2023.
Lockdown measures were introduced worldwide to prevent the spread of COVID-19, and several studies showed the positive impacts of these policies in places such as China and Europe. Many African governments also imposed lockdowns at the beginning of the pandemic. These lockdowns met with mixed reactions; some were positive, but others focused on concerns about the consequences of lockdowns.
In this article, we use social listening to examine social media narratives to investigate how people balanced concerns about preventing the spread of COVID-19 with other priorities. Analyzing social media conversations is one way of accessing different voices in real time, including those that often go unheard. As internet access grows and social media becomes more popular in Africa, it provides a different space for engagement, allowing people to connect with opinions outside of their own conceptual frameworks and disrupting hierarchies of how knowledge is shaped.
This article indicates which narratives were favored by different organizations, stakeholders, and the general public, and which of these narratives are most dominant in policy discourses. The range of narratives is found to be reflective of the blindness to inequality and social difference of much decision-making by policymakers.
Thus, contrary to the "we are all in this together" narrative, diseases and public health responses to them clearly discriminate, accentuating long-standing structural inequalities locally, nationally, and globally, as well as interplaying with multiple, dynamic, and negotiated sources of marginalization. These and other insights from this article could play a useful role in understanding and interpreting how social media could be included in pandemic preparedness plans.
为了防止 COVID-19 的传播，世界各地都采取了封锁措施，有几项研究表明这些政策在中国和欧洲等地产生了积极影响。许多非洲政府在疫情开始时也实施了封锁。这些封锁措施引起了不同的反应；一些是积极的，但另一些则关注封锁的后果。
在本文中，我们使用社会倾听来检查社交媒体的叙述，以调查人们如何平衡对预防 COVID-19 传播的担忧与其他优先事项。分析社交媒体对话是实时获取不同声音的一种方法，包括那些经常被忽视的声音。随着互联网的普及和社交媒体在非洲的普及，它提供了一个不同的参与空间，允许人们与自己的概念框架之外的观点联系起来，并打破了知识形成的层次结构。
本文指出了哪些叙述受到不同组织、利益相关者和公众的青睐，以及这些叙述在政策话语中哪些最为主导。这些叙述的范围反映了决策者在决策时对不平等和社会差异的忽视。
因此，与“我们都在这”的叙述相反，疾病和对它们的公共卫生反应显然存在歧视，突出了地方、国家和全球长期存在的结构性不平等，以及与多种动态和协商一致的边缘化来源相互作用。本文中的这些和其他见解可以在理解和解释社交媒体如何被纳入大流行病防范计划方面发挥有用作用。
