Sensing Community Resilience Using Social Media

This chapter discusses social media use and community resilience development during the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic in Singapore. It investigates how social media affects citizens' self-resilience capacities during various stages of the COVID-19 pandemic evolution, in particular, in terms of information gathering, information dissemination, information exchange, collaborative problem-solving, coping and promotion of connectedness in order to derive opportunities and challenges for community resilience building. The COVID-19 pandemic has unleashed unprecedented disruption to economy and society. Social media has become an integral part of many people's everyday lives. Social networking can influence citizens' self-reliance in the event of a crisis by providing avenues for getting quick and reliable information that reduces uncertainty. Singapore won praise from the World Health Organisation for its early response to dealing with COVID-19 pandemic without the need for enforced lockdowns.