Youngsters from Bhopal, Indore and tribal-dominated Jhabua in Madhya Pradesh held a unique virtual event ‘Blogathon’—a marathon of sharing social media content to create awareness and break stigma and discriminatory attitude on COVID-19—on Tuesday.
Supported by some prominent citizens and government officials, the youngsters shared self-created contents like messages, blogs, slogans, photographs, paintings, videos and others with the aim of creating awareness on the pandemic, the ways to prevent it and not associate any stigma or discrimination with the disease.
Around 350 content posts were created and shared on various social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and personal blogs and other social media platforms continuously from 9.00am to 5.00pm on Tuesday by over 150 youngsters.
The key theme was ‘SMS’—for (hand washing with) soap, (use of face) mask and (maintaining) social distancing.
The posts were shared on Facebook pages like COVID19 and HumansofMP, Instagram page of Youth4Children, blog named MP4COVID19Warriors and on respective social media handles of various organizations and individuals.
The event was jointly organized by School of Mass Communication and Journalism, Devi Ahilya Vishwavidyalaya, Indore; SkySocial, a youth group from Bhopal; Vasudha Sansthan that works in Jhabua and Madhya Pradesh office of UNICEF.
The 'blogathon' video messages were shared by prominent citizens like motivational speaker Pankaj Chaturvedi, political leader Geet Dhir, senior journalists Girish Upadhyay and Vijay Pratap Singh among others
District collector of Sagar Deepak Singh also made a video appeal to the citizens of his district to mandatorily use face mask if they were out of home.
Dr Santosh Shukla, additional health director of MP, in his video message spoke in detail about the theme ‘SMS’ as the best way to fight COVID-19.
Anil Gulati, communication specialist, UNICEF, said that the aim of ‘blogathon' by the youth was to increase positive discourse on COVID-19, bring out positive stories of COVID-19 warriors and spreading awareness messages using social media channels.
Dr Sonalee Nargunde, head of department of School of Mass Communication and Journalism, DAVV, Sristi Pragat, founder member of SkySocial and Gayatri Parihar of Vasudha Sanathan said that the event helped in engaging the youth and spreading the right messages on COVID-19.