The Impact of Social Media on Panic During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Iraqi KurdistanOnline Questionnaire Study

Araz Ramazan Ahmad, Hersh Rasool Murad•View original

OverviewBalancedalloy voice

Think back to March 2020. News pings on your phone every hour. A cousin shares a video. A friend posts a rumor. You're trying to figure out what's real while the world turns upside down. That blizzard of facts, half-truths, and hot takes got a name: the infodemic. And in Iraq—where there were about 29.8 million internet users and 21 million social media users at the start of that year—that storm hit a very online public square. Here's the question Araz Ramazan Ahmad and Hersh Rasool Murad asked in the Kurdistan Region: when people lean on social media to make sense of a fast-moving disease, does that reliance itself feed fear and panic? And if it does, what shows up in people's mental health? The stakes are obvious. Panic isn't just a feeling; it can shape what people do, whether they seek care, whether they trust instructions, or whether they crowd hospitals or avoid them. To get at that, Ahmad and Murad built a Kurdish-language survey and pushed it out online during lockdown. Five hundred sixteen Kurdish social media users answered. Before we go any further, it's worth saying they did their homework on the tool itself. The instrument cleared common reliability and validity checks—Cronbach's alpha was 0.825 and a validity index was 0.753—which, in plain English, means the questions hung together well and measured what they were intended to. And the sample wasn't tiny. In survey research, people often aim for roughly a couple hundred as a minimum; here, they had more than double that. What were these folks seeing in their feeds? One platform towered above the rest. Facebook was the place most respondents went for COVID-19 news; eighty-three percent said they used it for that. And the content was overwhelmingly about the pandemic itself: three out of four reported that health stories about COVID-19 dominated what they heard, saw, or read. Instagram trailed far behind, with only about six percent turning to it for COVID information. That's a lopsided media diet, and it matters. When one platform dominates, its norms and its algorithms have an outsized influence on what spreads. Now, not all posts are equal. Some pieces of content seem to light the match. When Ahmad and Murad asked which kinds of posts most fueled panic, one answer led the pack: fake news, named by about twenty-seven percent. After that came raw infection counts—about seventeen percent—and photos or videos of hard-hit places—about fifteen percent. People also pointed to more general fear-inducing posts, around eleven percent. The mix is telling. It's not just outright falsehoods; even true numbers, delivered without context, can unsettle. So does more social media exposure go hand in hand with more panic? The short version is yes. The authors ran a simple regression—think of it as drawing a line through the cloud of points that link how much social media to how much panic. The line is steep and clear. They report a correlation of 0.8701 between social media use and spreading panic, and the model explains about seventy-six percent of the variation in panic scores. The slope, the key number that tells you how much the panic score rises with each notch up in social media use, is about 0.65 and it's highly significant. In practical terms: in this sample, as self-reported social media engagement went up, self-reported panic rose sharply, and that relationship wasn't a statistical fluke. What did that feel like on the ground? Across the whole group, roughly thirty-nine percent said they felt a psychological impact tied to the COVID-19 news wave. Among people eighteen to thirty-five—the bulk of the sample—that fraction climbed to forty percent. And it wasn't universal; about thirty-six percent said they weren't afraid. That spectrum matters. It reminds us that the same information environment lands differently depending on who you are and what else you're juggling. There were also hints of how gender colored the experience. Men were more likely to say that publishing more COVID-19 news spreads fear and panic. And when asked whether Kurdish pages and accounts did a good job covering COVID-19, men leaned "no" more often; roughly sixty-eight percent of male "no" responses clustered there. It's a snapshot, not a verdict. But it signals that people's judgments about quality and harm vary, even inside the same feed. Let's pause here and translate the stats into everyday language. A correlation near 0.87 is big. Imagine a schoolteacher explaining test scores: if studying time and grades were that tightly linked, you'd tell students to hit the books because it clearly pays off. Here, the parallel is more sobering. More scrolling is strongly tied to more panic, at least as people remember and report it. And the regression slope of roughly two-thirds of a point per unit of social media use says the change isn't subtle. This is the kind of effect size you don't need a microscope to see. Of course, this is where we're careful. Ahmad and Murad couldn't run a randomized trial in the middle of a lockdown. This was a cross-sectional snapshot, taken at a time when people were scared and isolated. The data are self-reported, the sample is self-selected, and causality stays off-limits. The authors are clear about that. What they're offering is a well-measured association alongside a textured portrait of what people saw, where they saw it, and how they say it landed. So how does this fit into the bigger picture? Infodemiology—a field that treats the web as a data stream for tracking health information—and its cousin, infoveillance, have been building the case for years that social platforms pull double duty. They can be the quickest route for accurate health guidance, and they can be a superhighway for misinformation. As Depoux and colleagues put it early in the pandemic, social media wears three hats at once: it presents facts, it circulates falsehoods, and it stokes fear. Governments tried to tip the balance. Vietnam's Ministry of Health, for instance, stood up official social accounts to publish outbreak updates and shore up trust. Those efforts make sense. But much of the early evidence came from Western or global datasets. Ahmad and Murad's work helps fill a regional gap, grounding those global themes in the realities of Iraqi Kurdistan. The platform story is key here. If more than four out of five people in this sample turned to Facebook for COVID news, then Facebook's design choices—what gets promoted, what gets labeled, who gets reach—become a public health variable. Pair that with the age pattern the study highlights, where younger users are both the most exposed and, by their own report, among the most affected, and you have a clear signal about where to focus scarce attention. Let me also pull on one thread from the content analysis. Remember how raw case counts showed up as a panic driver right behind fake news? That points to a communication challenge we can actually act on, even without proving causation. Numbers need narrative. Posting an infection count without trendlines, without denominators, without what it means for a person's risk this week, is like shouting "fire" without pointing to the exit. The study doesn't test messaging strategies, but it does map what people found agitating. Now, limitations. The survey fielded during a crisis, online, to the people who chose to click. That's not a random slice of Kurdistan. Measures of panic and social media use are self-reports, not behavioral logs or clinical assessments. And the regression is simple by design—one predictor, one outcome—so it can't untangle all the confounders that swirl around a real-life feed. None of that makes the findings trivial. It just keeps us honest about what they are: strong, suggestive correlations embedded in a rich description of an information environment. So what do we do with a portrait like this? Ahmad and Murad lean into risk communication. They argue for something concrete: collaboration between health professionals and media experts; get vetted information out fast; teach people—especially students and young adults—how to check sources and weigh claims before sharing. They point to the obvious players in Kurdistan, like the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Education, and to universities as places to build media literacy muscle. It's pragmatic. You don't need to invent a new theory of the internet to make progress here. Pulling back, this study does three useful things at once. It quantifies a link between social media use and self-reported panic in a non-Western setting, with a correlation that's too large to ignore. It sketches the media diet—Facebook-heavy, COVID-saturated—that shaped what people encountered day to day. And it spotlights age and content patterns that can guide where and how to communicate when the next outbreak hits. We're all tempting ourselves with doom scrolls in moments of uncertainty. The Kurdistan data remind us that the feed is not just entertainment; it's an ambient environment that can change how a crisis feels and how we act inside it. That doesn't make social media the villain. It makes it a system we have to manage deliberately when stakes are high. Strengthen the official channels. Make accuracy travel fast. Wrap the scary numbers in context. And teach the next generation how to navigate an infodemic without being swept away.

Think back to March 2020. News pings on your phone every hour. A cousin shares a video.

A friend posts a rumor. You're trying to figure out what's real while the world turns upside down. That blizzard of facts, half-truths, and hot takes got a name: the infodemic.

And in Iraq—where there were about 29.8 million internet users and 21 million social media users at the start of that year—that storm hit a very online public square.

Here's the question Araz Ramazan Ahmad and Hersh Rasool Murad asked in the Kurdistan Region: when people lean on social media to make sense of a fast-moving disease, does that reliance itself feed fear and panic? And if it does, what shows up in people's mental health? The stakes are obvious.

Panic isn't just a feeling; it can shape what people do, whether they seek care, whether they trust instructions, or whether they crowd hospitals or avoid them.

To get at that, Ahmad and Murad built a Kurdish-language survey and pushed it out online during lockdown. Five hundred sixteen Kurdish social media users answered. Before we go any further, it's worth saying they did their homework on the tool itself.

The instrument cleared common reliability and validity checks—Cronbach's alpha was 0.825 and a validity index was 0.753—which, in plain English, means the questions hung together well and measured what they were intended to. And the sample wasn't tiny. In survey research, people often aim for roughly a couple hundred as a minimum; here, they had more than double that.

What were these folks seeing in their feeds? One platform towered above the rest. Facebook was the place most respondents went for COVID-19 news; eighty-three percent said they used it for that.

And the content was overwhelmingly about the pandemic itself: three out of four reported that health stories about COVID-19 dominated what they heard, saw, or read. Instagram trailed far behind, with only about six percent turning to it for COVID information. That's a lopsided media diet, and it matters.

When one platform dominates, its norms and its algorithms have an outsized influence on what spreads.

Now, not all posts are equal. Some pieces of content seem to light the match. When Ahmad and Murad asked which kinds of posts most fueled panic, one answer led the pack: fake news, named by about twenty-seven percent.

After that came raw infection counts—about seventeen percent—and photos or videos of hard-hit places—about fifteen percent. People also pointed to more general fear-inducing posts, around eleven percent. The mix is telling.

It's not just outright falsehoods; even true numbers, delivered without context, can unsettle.

So does more social media exposure go hand in hand with more panic? The short version is yes. The authors ran a simple regression—think of it as drawing a line through the cloud of points that link how much social media to how much panic.

The line is steep and clear. They report a correlation of 0.8701 between social media use and spreading panic, and the model explains about seventy-six percent of the variation in panic scores. The slope, the key number that tells you how much the panic score rises with each notch up in social media use, is about 0.65 and it's highly significant.

In practical terms: in this sample, as self-reported social media engagement went up, self-reported panic rose sharply, and that relationship wasn't a statistical fluke.

What did that feel like on the ground? Across the whole group, roughly thirty-nine percent said they felt a psychological impact tied to the COVID-19 news wave. Among people eighteen to thirty-five—the bulk of the sample—that fraction climbed to forty percent.

And it wasn't universal; about thirty-six percent said they weren't afraid. That spectrum matters. It reminds us that the same information environment lands differently depending on who you are and what else you're juggling.

There were also hints of how gender colored the experience. Men were more likely to say that publishing more COVID-19 news spreads fear and panic. And when asked whether Kurdish pages and accounts did a good job covering COVID-19, men leaned "no" more often; roughly sixty-eight percent of male "no" responses clustered there.

It's a snapshot, not a verdict. But it signals that people's judgments about quality and harm vary, even inside the same feed.

Let's pause here and translate the stats into everyday language. A correlation near 0.87 is big. Imagine a schoolteacher explaining test scores: if studying time and grades were that tightly linked, you'd tell students to hit the books because it clearly pays off.

Here, the parallel is more sobering. More scrolling is strongly tied to more panic, at least as people remember and report it. And the regression slope of roughly two-thirds of a point per unit of social media use says the change isn't subtle. This is the kind of effect size you don't need a microscope to see.

Of course, this is where we're careful. Ahmad and Murad couldn't run a randomized trial in the middle of a lockdown. This was a cross-sectional snapshot, taken at a time when people were scared and isolated.

The data are self-reported, the sample is self-selected, and causality stays off-limits. The authors are clear about that. What they're offering is a well-measured association alongside a textured portrait of what people saw, where they saw it, and how they say it landed.

So how does this fit into the bigger picture? Infodemiology—a field that treats the web as a data stream for tracking health information—and its cousin, infoveillance, have been building the case for years that social platforms pull double duty. They can be the quickest route for accurate health guidance, and they can be a superhighway for misinformation.

As Depoux and colleagues put it early in the pandemic, social media wears three hats at once: it presents facts, it circulates falsehoods, and it stokes fear. Governments tried to tip the balance. Vietnam's Ministry of Health, for instance, stood up official social accounts to publish outbreak updates and shore up trust.

Those efforts make sense. But much of the early evidence came from Western or global datasets. Ahmad and Murad's work helps fill a regional gap, grounding those global themes in the realities of Iraqi Kurdistan.

The platform story is key here. If more than four out of five people in this sample turned to Facebook for COVID news, then Facebook's design choices—what gets promoted, what gets labeled, who gets reach—become a public health variable. Pair that with the age pattern the study highlights, where younger users are both the most exposed and, by their own report, among the most affected, and you have a clear signal about where to focus scarce attention.

Let me also pull on one thread from the content analysis. Remember how raw case counts showed up as a panic driver right behind fake news? That points to a communication challenge we can actually act on, even without proving causation.

Numbers need narrative. Posting an infection count without trendlines, without denominators, without what it means for a person's risk this week, is like shouting "fire" without pointing to the exit. The study doesn't test messaging strategies, but it does map what people found agitating.

Now, limitations. The survey fielded during a crisis, online, to the people who chose to click. That's not a random slice of Kurdistan.

Measures of panic and social media use are self-reports, not behavioral logs or clinical assessments. And the regression is simple by design—one predictor, one outcome—so it can't untangle all the confounders that swirl around a real-life feed. None of that makes the findings trivial.

It just keeps us honest about what they are: strong, suggestive correlations embedded in a rich description of an information environment.

So what do we do with a portrait like this? Ahmad and Murad lean into risk communication. They argue for something concrete: collaboration between health professionals and media experts; get vetted information out fast; teach people—especially students and young adults—how to check sources and weigh claims before sharing.

They point to the obvious players in Kurdistan, like the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Education, and to universities as places to build media literacy muscle. It's pragmatic. You don't need to invent a new theory of the internet to make progress here.

Pulling back, this study does three useful things at once. It quantifies a link between social media use and self-reported panic in a non-Western setting, with a correlation that's too large to ignore. It sketches the media diet—Facebook-heavy, COVID-saturated—that shaped what people encountered day to day.

And it spotlights age and content patterns that can guide where and how to communicate when the next outbreak hits.

We're all tempting ourselves with doom scrolls in moments of uncertainty. The Kurdistan data remind us that the feed is not just entertainment; it's an ambient environment that can change how a crisis feels and how we act inside it. That doesn't make social media the villain.

It makes it a system we have to manage deliberately when stakes are high. Strengthen the official channels. Make accuracy travel fast.

Wrap the scary numbers in context. And teach the next generation how to navigate an infodemic without being swept away.

Related lectures