Health communication approach of Arab social media during COVID-19

In the last two years, Covid-19 pandemic has given rise to health communication. In the Arab region, the public has paid much attention to health issues at the expense of political affairs that overwhelmed the region in the last decade. In this respect, this article seeks to characterize health communication, as a growing research field specifically on social media. In doing so, the article investigates the characteristics of the news posted on Facebook by major Arab media outlets about Covid-19 pandemic. A content and thematic analysis were used to analyze 1102 posts extracted from 6 prominent news Facebook pages that belong to major local news media channels in six Arab countries: Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Egypt, Lebanon, and Tunisia. The results showed three significant categories of themes, around which the Facebook pages have stitched their health communication approach: (1) the spread of the virus; (2) death rates; and (3) the global scope of the pandemic. In addition, a discreet logic was adopted by the pages in dealing with the local consequences of the crisis in return for a flexible logic in the portrayal of the crisis in foreign countries.