The Role of Social Networks in the Formation of Social Lifestyle Changes Caused by the Covid-19

Abstract

Today, the outbreak of the coronavirus has become a major global crisis and has affected many countries. One of the consequences of the spread of this virus is the creation of social panic and rapid changes in people’s lifestyles, which the social networks are noticing. The impact of social media, which plays an effective role even in people’s lifestyles, is being examined in the Covid-19 Pandemic. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of social networks in lifestyle changes in the coronavirus pandemic period. The present research is quantitative in terms of approach and in terms of type and nature, it is a descriptive survey. The data collection tool was assumed to be the Twitter social network. A total of 100.000 cases have been investigated based on the support vector machine (SVM) method and its results have been compared with decision tree and naive Bayes methods. Data processing is done using Python software. The trained model of SVM has a success rate on accuracy as near to 97% and also has 92% in the F1 score. The results show that social networks have about a 30% effect on lifestyle changes and stress during the pandemic periods. In order to form logical and desirable behaviors instead of dramatic behaviors such as fear and social stress in the use of social networks, social agents have their priority in organizing information and knowledge and informing the target community about the constructive and harmful cases of these networks and place different social roles and activities in society. Accordingly, providing the right news and information through trusted and responsible channels and platforms can play an important role in the proper management of society.