فهرست نشریات علمی دسترسی آزاد ایران

BACKGROUND: The widespread occurrence of COVID‑19 has caused people to seek informationfrom various sources such as virtual social networks, which can positively or negatively affect one’smental status. In this article, we present the role of virtual social networks in shaping people’s attitudestoward COVID‑19 in Iran.MATERIALS AND METHODS: This is an applied descriptive study, in which 1010 users of virtualsocial networks were surveyed through an electronic questionnaire. Data were analyzed with SPSS,Excel, and Rapid Miner software. The FP‑growth technique was used to investigate the concurrenceof choices in multiple‑choice questions, and the Mann–Whitney and the Kruskal–Wallis tests wereused to determine the correlation of the mean of each dimension with demographic data. Moreover,the Wilcoxon signed‑rank, the Shapiro–Wilk, and the Kolmogorov–Smirnov tests were used.RESULTS: Virtual social networks use increased significantly (40%) after the COVID‑19 outbreak.According to users, the greatest psychological impact of virtual social networks was the inductionof anxiety (46.43%) and the most common use was to learn about COVID‑19 prevention andtreatment (69.3%). Based on the findings, there were no significant differences between the“awareness,” “behavior intention,” and “attitude and trust” and the users’ marital status, age group,educational degree, and gender.CONCLUSION: Although social networks have enriched the public knowledge, they increased theindividuals’ anxiety mostly because of controversial news and disperse of misinformation which in turnmisled the users. The social networks play an important role in directing the behavioral inclinations.Accordingly, it is recommended that the authorities in healthcare system establish authentic andformal webpage in these social networks to manage controversial and voluminous information.