Friendship in the age of COVID-19: Facebook new features
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Laila Shoma [1] ; Leo Chan [1]
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[1] University of Houston
University of Houston
Estados Unidos
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- Localización: Desinformación y credibilidad en el ecosistema digital: actas del XII Congreso Internacional de Ciberperiodismo / coord. por Koldobika Meso Ayerdi, Simón Peña Fernández, Ainara Larrondo Ureta, 2021, ISBN 978-84-1319-284-0, págs. 377-386
- Idioma: inglés
- Enlaces
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Resumen
Due to the global COVID-19 pandemic, social distance, quarantine and lockdown, face-to-face hangouts were confined in many countries. As a result, general public started looking and depending on technology for virtual meetings. One of the platforms that supported this type of hangouts is Facebook. With the start of the lockdown, Facebook established, reintroduced, and maintained many features to help keep friends staying in contact. This paper aims to understand the success and failure of Facebook’s new features that help keep people connected amid the global pandemic. The results show that these new features had affected the communication and connectivity of the members of the society during the pandemic, as the usage of Facebook increased during this period. Moreover, it reveals that people were to use social media to stay connected with friends, if confined at home due to COVID-19.
