How Social Media Selfies Might Contribute to COVID-19 Risk
During the holidays, people’s social media feeds are typically punctuated by a plethora of holiday selfies. These selfies might range from photos of people on a plane heading home from vacation to large holiday gatherings with co-workers, family, and/or friends to people enjoying fine dining at an expensive restaurant (that is, if restaurants have not been shuttered by local governments to contain COVID-19 spread). All these activities would put an individual at a moderate-high risk for contracting COVID-19 according to a COVID-19 risk scale devised by the Texas Medical Association.
Thus, while in previous years these sorts of holiday selfies might have been enviable, in 2020, they should be setting off alarm bells. Currently, one-fifth of all ICUs in hospitals across the country are at capacity, due in part, to people ignoring warnings from public health officials not to gather during Thanksgiving. Moreover, a new, possibly even more contagious strain of COVID-19, which was first discovered in the United Kingdom, has migrated to the United States.
However, for the people who are already engaging in these types of activities, seeing other people’s posts about similar activities can reinforce their beliefs and help them to maintain their high COVID-19 risk behaviors – a phenomenon known as the false consensus effect– the assumption that most of the population is also engaging in high COVID-19 risk behaviors, such as going on vacation, attending holiday gatherings with people outside their bubble and/or eating out at restaurants. On the flipside of the coin, those who have been mostly averse to engaging in COVID-19 risk behaviors this holiday season might begin to fall prey to pluralistic ignorance, in which they incorrectly believe that most people are engaging in and approve of high COVID-19 risk behaviors and they are alone in their decisions to be conservative, after seeing such selfies on their social media feeds. This might be because as the pandemic has worn on, people are posting less and less about engaging in COVID-19 protective behaviors, such as staying at home to save lives, and have, for the most part, returned to posting about noteworthy life events. Given that many people already feel pressure to do something special on New Year's Eve, these individuals who have refrained from engaging in high COVID-19 risk behaviors may begin questioning whether they are depriving themselves unnecessarily and give in to the temptation to party like it’s 1999, which might ultimately contribute to additional COVID-19 spread.
This is not to say that social media cannot be used for promoting the greater good. We have seen how social media has galvanized people to engage in prosocial behaviors, such as encouraging users to vote in the last presidential election or creating momentum for worthy causes such as the Ice Bucket Challenge, which raised over $220 million dollars and awareness for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. One type of prosocial selfie that is sure to gain more and more traction in the coming year as COVID-19 vaccines become more readily available to the public are vaccine selfies (aka vaxxies). In fact, I predict the “I Got My COVID-19 Vaccine” stickers will become the new “I Voted” selfie status sticker of 2021.