Impact of influencers’ Facebook pages in cultivating fear and terror among youths during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

Many research studies defined news pages that connect users with public affairs as social media influencers. This includes opinion leaders, journalists, media personnel, editors, and political experts. In this sense, news consumption on influencers’ Facebook pages can have the same cultivation impact as consuming news on any offline platform, particularly during times of threat. Within this, we aim to reexamine the cultivation theory in the context of social media. Thus, we explore the role of influencers on Facebook in cultivating threat perception among youths during the COVID-19 pandemic. Also, to examine the possible correlation between threat perception and favoring of more restrictive policies on Facebook news coverage. For this, we used the survey method (n=1,309) on youths aged 18-35 years in Egypt, Spain, and the USA. In this respect, our data revealed a significant relationship between news consumption on influencers’ Facebook pages and threat level. The more people consume news on influencers’ Facebook pages, the higher their threat perception is. Our findings also demonstrate that even though the cultivation assumption is valid in the context of Facebook, there are variations from the TV context postulation. Nowadays, people are aware of the effect of their news exposure on shaping their perception yet being aware did not mediate the cultivation effect.