In this crisis of Covid-19, Facebook, from the beginning, has extended its unrelenting support to the people of Bangladesh.
Partnering with the ICT Ministry and a2i, Facebook has recently helped launch a much-needed initiative to create awareness in the social media community about safety measures during COVID-19.
Zunaid Ahmed Palak MP, state minister of ICT division, officially inaugurated this campaign virtually by posting a video on his timeline.
“The Ministry of ICT in partnership with Facebook has launched a nationwide social media campaign under a2i’s Human Development Media to disseminate health messaging awareness for the people of Bangladesh,” Palak stated during the virtual inauguration.
He added, “This campaign will focus on sharing information about social distancing, prevention measures, covid19 symptoms, national helpline number 333 and various other resources available like corona.gov.bd etc. Facebook has been cooperative to initiate various awareness campaigns during this pandemic. I thank Facebook for their incredible support and partnership for developing and launching this campaign in Bangladesh during these Covid-19 time.”
To support this campaign, Facebook has helped create awareness videos which will be broadcast for the next three weeks, and we hope to reach out to all the Facebook users in Bangladesh by then. Until now, the campaign has reached almost 3 crore (30 million) social media users in the country.
Purabi Matin, Human Development Media Manager of a2i added, “It is undoubtedly a massive awareness campaign. We thank Facebook for this very useful initiative. We have been working tirelessly to create awareness among citizens through various contents and campaigns; yet many more Public Awareness Campaigns need to be initiated to combat coronavirus and adjust to the new normal life”.
Besides this campaign, Facebook has created a dedicated section in its COVID-19 Information Center to stop the spread of misinformation. Called Facts about COVID-19, an attempt is made here to debunk common myths as those identified by the World Health Organization such as ‘drinking bleach will prevent the coronavirus or that taking hydroxychloroquine can prevent COVID-19’.
Facebook has proactively reached out to support communities during any crisis and this is no exception. Even as early as March 2020 when the a2i Human development media team organized a virtual knowledge sharing conference, the Facebook Policy and Programs teams conducted learning sessions for doctors, social media campaign managers and other health domain stakeholders, focused on creating awareness and health messaging campaigns.