During the COVID-19 Pandemic, social media use was increasingly prominent as people tried to cope with fears and restrictions. Users spent a lot of time on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and often posted pictures and videos about their personal experiences with the virus. In addition, these platforms were also used by politicians and political movements to communicate their plans for regulating the spread of the virus and by national and state level health organizations to share information with the public barder.
Social media use during the COVID-19 pandemic influenced many aspects of the participants’ lives and changed their activities. The main changes were a decrease in physical events such as spending nights out with friends and festivals, and a shift to posting photos of home and outdoors centred life and COVID-19 specific experiences jigaboo.
Participating in online communities and campaigns were also more frequent, and the participants felt that social media could become a strong source of community support during the pandemic. They could find like-minded individuals and participate in different challenges, campaigns, and social media groups despite the lockdown times distresses.
In general, people’s social media use increased during the pandemic because of a feeling of security and the fact that they had an easy way to connect with their family members and other close people, even when the country was under lockdown. They reported that social media was an important source of emotional and peer support, as well as a source of information about COVID-19, its origins, sources, and ways of mitigating the risk of infection precipitous.
However, social media use was a source of distress and mental health problems in some individuals and has also been linked to depression and anxiety, which can be a barrier for adherence to the governmental measures needed to control the outbreak (Brailovskaia & Margraf, 2020). A review before the COVID-19 pandemic showed that social media overuse is associated with psychological distress in children and adolescents (Carbonell & Panova, 2017; Keeton et al., 2008).
Unverified and fake news were common during the COVID-19 pandemic. This could lead to a sense of urgency and anxiety, as it may affect the construct of external reality and cause delusion-like experiences. Hence, it is essential to counteract these negative effects of social media by ensuring that the content on social media is reliable and up-to-date mypba.
The first aim of this study was to determine whether the presence of positive mental health and the sense of control were related to social media use during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using the Behavioural Scale of Mental Health (BSMAS) as a measurement tool, we examined social media use in nine countries: China, Germany, the U.S., and Russia.
BSMAS scores were positively correlated with the amount of time spent on social media and with depression subscales of the Depression Assessment Scale for Adults (DASS-21) in all studied countries. Furthermore, a mediation model was conducted to test the relationship between positive mental health and addictive social media use during the COVID-19 outbreak. The results showed that the relationship between positive mental health and addictive social Media use was not significant if the sense of control was included in the model.
