How MSF Operations Can Utilize Social Media to Deliver Health Promotion : A Case Study of the MSF Patient Multimedia Engagement Project (2019-2021)

Abstract: Over the past decade, improved access to the internet and internet-connected devices have accelerated a rapid and vast adoption of information communication technologies and social media everywhere, changing everything from how people organize to how we access information. This development means new opportunities as well as challenges for humanitarian organizations to communicate with the communities they serve. To date, social media for humanitarian aid is a vastly untapped and largely under-researched field (Cone, 2012). Most studies of social media are based on research methods that assume that we can generalize across different user groups, despite ample evidence that people’s perception and usage of social media are highly context-specific (Miller et al., 2016). This reality poses challenges for humanitarian organizations with stakeholders spread across the world—compounded by the fact that a majority of studies of social media and other Web 2.0 tools focus on high-resource settings. This thesis aims to explore the potential of social media for health promotion and community engagement purposes in humanitarian settings through a naturalistic case study of the MSF Patent Multimedia Engagement project (2019-2021). The analysis draws on the Three Level Digital Divide Framework (Van Deursen and van Dijk, 2019) and a theorization of the Patient Health Engagement Model (Graffigna and Barello, 2018).