“I Don’t Feel Like a Hero”: Frontline Healthcare Providers’ Social Media Storytelling during COVID-19

Abstract

While much of the world watched rising numbers of COVID-19 infections and deaths from the safety of their homes, frontline healthcare providers (FHPs) were face-to-face with a virus that threatened the globe. While our social, political, and economic structures were ill-equipped to handle a global health crisis and our politicization of the disease nurtured divisive dialogues, FHPs pushed their own bodies and minds to unimaginable limits as they witnessed and fought the realities of COVID-19 to care for patients. During and between their extended shifts, FHPs shared their stories on social media platforms, bringing an otherwise hidden perspective of the pandemic to accessible online spaces. In this qualitative study, we analyzed 1 year of FHPs' Twitter posts (March 13, 2020 through March 12, 2021) to engage with the narratives embedded within their tweets. We also interviewed FHPs to learn about their experiences using social media during the pandemic. Findings suggest that FHPs' social media engagement was a communicative effort to cultivate resilience within a context beyond their immediate control while shaping our collective COVID-19 narrative. Twitter served as a permissible public space in which they could manage the tension of being both person and professional, sharing stories of testimony and witness to reveal, manage, and respond to the traumas, vulnerabilities, and injustices they experienced: sacrificing self, caring while pawns to power, and fulfilling responsibility to educate amid contentious spaces.

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