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Circadian rhythm in the pattern of online usage of Facebook messenger during the COVID-19-triggered lockdown: a sequel to the pre-pandemic study

ABSTRACT The Government of India imposed the strictest lockdown from 25 March 2020 till 31 May 2020 to control the spread of coronavirus outbreak. Consequently, about 1.38 billion people were under home confinement. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, we studied circadian rhythm (CR) in the usages of Facebook Messenger (FBM), as a group phenomenon, and published the findings in this journal. We thought it would be worthwhile to carry out a sequel study to assess if there are any changes in the CR in the patterns of digital activity of the FBM users during the COVID-19-triggered lockdown. All the authors of this paper harvested real-time data from their FBM account for over 16 consecutive days between 26 March and 17 April 2020. A statistically significant CR in the digital activity pattern of FBM friends of all the authors was validated. Results of one-way repeated measures ANOVA revealed a statistically significant higher Mesor and amplitude of the rhythm in FBM activity patterns during the lockdown; however, acrophase remained unchanged. We concluded that the COVID-19-triggered lockdown did not affect the location of the peaks and the persistence of CR in the online activity patterns of FBM users.