Obesity-Related Discourse on Facebook and Instagram Throughout the COVID-19 Pandemic: Comparative Longitudinal Evaluation
Obesity-Related Discourse on Facebook and Instagram Throughout the COVID-19 Pandemic: Comparative Longitudinal Evaluation
Blog Article
BackgroundCOVID-19 severity is amplified among individuals with obesity, which may have influenced mainstream media coverage of the disease by both improving understanding of the condition and increasing weight-related stigma.ObjectiveWe aimed to measure obesity-related conversations on Facebook and Instagram around key dates during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.MethodsPublic Facebook and Instagram posts were extracted for 29-day windows in 2020 around January att nighthawk hotspot 28 (the first US COVID-19 case), March 11 (when COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic), May 19 (when obesity and COVID-19 were linked in mainstream media), and October 2 (when former US president Trump contracted COVID-19 and obesity was mentioned most frequently in the mainstream media).Trends in daily posts and corresponding interactions were evaluated using interrupted time series.
The 10 most frequent obesity-related topics on each platform were also examined.ResultsOn Facebook, there was a temporary increase in 2020 in obesity-related posts and interactions on May 19 (posts +405, 95% CI 166 to 645; interactions +294,930, 95% CI 125,986 to 463,874) and October 2 (posts +639, 95% CI 359 to 883; interactions +182,814, 95% CI 160,524 to 205,105).On Instagram, there were temporary increases in 2020 only in interactions on May 19 (+226,017, 95% CI 107,323 to 344,708) and October 2 (+156,974, 95% CI 89,757 to 224,192).Similar trends were not observed in controls.
Five of the most frequent topics overlapped (COVID-19, bariatric surgery, weight loss stories, pediatric obesity, and sleep); opheliasmuse.com additional topics specific to each platform included diet fads, food groups, and clickbait.ConclusionsSocial media conversations surged in response to obesity-related public health news.Conversations contained both clinical and commercial content of possibly dubious accuracy.Our findings support the idea that major public health announcements may coincide with the spread of health-related content (truthful or otherwise) on social media.