YOUTUBE MONITORING STUDY AS A COMPLEMENTARY INFORMATION STRATEGY IN ADDRESSING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC (Atena Editora)

Abstract

Effective community mitigation through voluntary behavior change has become indispensable and the best way to reduce mortality caused by COVID-19. The objective of the work was to conduct a follow-up study to track the most viewed Brazilian videos on YouTube about COVID-19 to determine how the coverage of preventive behaviors for effective community mitigation changed during the period included in the research. This is an exploratory, cross-sectional and quantitative study carried out on 06/30/2020, using the descriptor ‘coronavirus’. Initially, the 144 videos with the highest number of views on the website and published between 05/01/2020 and 06/30/2020 were pre-selected, considering that these two months represented the rapid growth of confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Brazil. Videos not recorded in Portuguese, duplicated or longer than 30 minutes were excluded. Two evaluators recorded the uniform resource locators (URL) of the videos, which were downloaded from the YouTube website to analyze data on their audience and duration. Finally, data analysis was carried out and the results were described. The study did not require approval from the Research Ethics Committee, as it involves public data. Among the pre-selected and most viewed videos on YouTube, 17 were excluded (6 in other languages, 5 in English and 1 in Chinese; 1 duplicate; 10 longer than 30 minutes). The top 100 most viewed videos were analyzed and revealed the following results: A total of 29,278,053 views; 1,062,780 “liked”; 65,017 “I didn’t like it”; 125,841 comments; and duration of 10 hours, 15 minutes and 26 seconds. It is interesting to note that in phase 2 there was a decrease in the approach to prevention behaviors, as less than a third of the videos in phase 1 and less than a fifth in phase 2 addressed any of the main prevention behaviors listed by the Centers for Prevention and Control. of US Diseases. Furthermore, there was also a decrease in information about the symptoms of COVID-19 in phase 2 in relation to phase 1. Given the continuity of the pandemic, the number of video views highlighted YouTube's potential to be used as a mediator of interaction and communication about COVID-19. However, on the other hand, the analysis of the videos also revealed that the videos available on YouTube could contribute more significantly to educating and mobilizing the public to adopt community mitigation behaviors against COVID-19 in Brazil.