Emergencia social y visiones pandemicas en Latinoamerica: Un estudio de los flujos comunicativos en Facebook durante el primer semestre del 2020 Social emergency and pandemic visions in Latin America: A study of the communication flows on Facebook during the first half of 2020

ABSTRACT

This work focuses on the communication flows related to COVID-19 generated in Latin America by Facebook users during the first half of 2020. The main objective is to analyze the information shared in relation to three main categories (a) government actions related to public health and safety, (b) society's reactions to the emergency, and (c) the vision of the post -pandemic future. The methodology used in this work is content analysis, from which a study corpus was analyzed, to identify and generate categories on the topics addressed in the information flows. Frequency distribution tables were used to ponder the diffusion weights of each thematic category. The results provide, from an exploratory level, evidence on the impact of social networks in the pandemic context, not only in a positive way, but also generating uncertainty, protests, and repression through the spread of fake news and conspiracy theories.