Covid-19 Framing through Social Media in Indonesia

Abstract

The emergence of the COVID-19 virus at the end of 2019 quickly monopolized the attention of the entire world community. The lack of public understanding and knowledge of the current conditions raises a need for information related to the COVID-19 pandemic, and they are trying to fulfill it through various ways, one of which is by accessing social media. Updates related to COVID-19 are shared daily on social media through various points of view according to the perspective and goals of the author. This research is a mixed method study which aims to analyze the effect of using Instagram accounts on meeting information needs related to COVID-19 and to analyze the framing that is mostly used in uploads related to COVID-19. This study chose Lambe Turah's Instagram account and his followers as research subjects. The first data was obtained through a questionnaire  distributed using Google form media to followers of the Lambe Turah account. There were 220 respondents whose data were further processed using regression analysis to see the influence between the research variables. The second data was obtained through sorting out the contents of the Lambe Turah account  in the period of January 1, 2020 to July 1, 2020 and obtained 432 uploads related to COVID-19. The data were then further analyzed using framing analysis. The results of the influence test show that the use of Lambe Turah's Instagram account affects the fulfillment of the information needs  of the followers regarding COVID-19. In the framing analysis results, it was found that the content related to COVID-19 on Lambe Turah's Instagram account was more thematically framed than episodic.