Online Blame and Ebola. Exploring the Lay Public’s Understanding of National and Global Health Authorities' Accountability in Times of Epidemics.

This communication aims to analyze the tensions between national and global health authorities during the recent (2014-2016) Ebola outbreak, from the lay public’s perspective. To do so, we will explore the main target of blame in social media conversations. We will use this accusatory discourse to explore which health authorities the lay public initially held accountable for the Ebola epidemic response (and subsequently accused of having failed their duty).

We will draw upon the analysis of data which was collected from Twitter and Facebook using key word extraction. The collected comments were divided into opinion-based data (primary data) and news-based comments (escort discourse data), each of which was submitted to a content analysis.

From this analysis of online conversations, we will discuss what we call a “proximal blame trend”, that is a tendency for social media users to cast blame “locally” (on the national state and nearby groups), while omitting “far away” people, places and authorities (including global health authorities). Understanding blame as a reaction from the lay public that results from perceived failures from actors in which hope and accountability had been previously invested, we will discuss the importance of national health authorities in the eyes of the lay public, and problematize the near absence of global health authorities in accusatory discourse. This will be situated within preexisting social, cultural and historical relations and scripts.

As such, this communication will show how national and global health authorities can benefit from social media analyses on the topic of blame to gain greater insight into the lay public’s expectations relating to epidemic responses. Drawing on our results, we will conclude by showing how such an insight can allow for better adjusted communication and management strategies in times of epidemic, in order to foster deeper collaborations between national and global health authorities.