Could the COVID-19 Messages Spread on Whatsapp be a New and Different Form of Chain Letters?

Chain letters are texts sent by any person, addressed to the recipient by transmitting a specific story, and demanding that the recipient follow certain instructions and that the content sent to him or her be reproduced and sent to others. The chain letters, written in many different forms and contents since their emergence, make their recipients promise “luck and money, pray, happiness, peace”, enabling the text to be reproduced and sent to a certain number of people over a certain period. Chain letters are texts that warn about bad luck if the instructions are not followed. Chain letters, while being distributed by writing in traditional ways, evolved into chain e-mails with the advent of computers and the internet, and later, chain letters that were often shared in social media such as Facebook and Twitter emerged. The last area of propagation of chain letters has been the instant communication app WhatsApp. Chain letters, which can be described as contemporary/urban legends, have also benefited from the speed and anonymity of the internet, becoming more common than ever before in history. At the end of 2019 in Wuhan, China, COVID-19 disease has become a global pandemic and a period of the peak for chain letters. The chain letters, fed by the danger and obscurity of the epidemic, have become very quickly sent from person to person around the world via WhatsApp, an instant communication application. In this study, based on the hypothesis that the messages spread in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic on WhatsApp are a new and different form of chain letters, examined the similarities and differences between these messages and the traditional chain letters and whether these messages. By analyzing four widely shared audio recordings and three text messages related to the COVID-19 pandemic, the characteristics of the next generation of chain letters have been revealed.

Keywords

chain letters, COVID-19 pandemic, WhatsApp messages, new and different chain letters, contemporary legends.