scholarly journals Twitter Engagement of U.S. Psychiatry Residency Programs with Black Lives Matter and Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)

Author(s):  
Osama El-Gabalawy ◽  
Candice J. Kim ◽  
Amanda V. Chen ◽  
Shaan Kamal

AbstractSocial media have become popular platforms to disseminate information, especially related to politicized topics such as BLM and COVID-19. To better understand how medical institutions have engaged with the social media discourse on BLM and COVID-19, we examined psychiatry residency programs’ tweets in response to George Floyd’s murder and during the first 6 months of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. Only 14% of the 249 evaluated psychiatry residency programs had Twitter accounts (we included programs with their own account or their affiliated psychiatry department account) indicating a substantial absence on social media. Of those programs, 78% tweeted at least once about COVID-19 (1,153 tweets) and 56% tweeted at least once about the BLM movement (117 tweets). The top three purposes of tweets were sharing media, posting about an event, and sharing a resource.

2020 ◽  
Vol 114 (4) ◽  
pp. 947-962
Author(s):  
TABITHA BONILLA ◽  
ALVIN B. TILLERY

The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has organized hundreds of disruptive protests in American cities since 2013 (Garza 2014; Harris 2015; Taylor 2016). The movement has garnered considerable attention from the U.S. media and is well recognized by the U.S. public (Horowitz and Livingston 2016; Neal 2017). Social movement scholars suggest that such robust mobilizations are typically predicated on clear social movement frames (Benford and Snow 2000; Snow et al. 1986). Tillery (2019b) has identified several distinct message frames within the social media communications of BLM activists. In this paper, we use a survey experiment to test the effect of three of these frames—Black Nationalist, Feminist, and LGBTQ+ Rights—on the mobilization of African Americans. We find that exposure to these frames generates differential effects on respondents’ willingness to support, trust, canvass, and write representatives about the Black Lives Matter movement. These findings raise new questions about the deployment of intersectional messaging strategies within movements for racial justice.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 215013272199545
Author(s):  
Areej Khokhar ◽  
Aaron Spaulding ◽  
Zuhair Niazi ◽  
Sikander Ailawadhi ◽  
Rami Manochakian ◽  
...  

Importance: Social media is widely used by various segments of society. Its role as a tool of communication by the Public Health Departments in the U.S. remains unknown. Objective: To determine the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on social media following of the Public Health Departments of the 50 States of the U.S. Design, Setting, and Participants: Data were collected by visiting the Public Health Department web page for each social media platform. State-level demographics were collected from the U.S. Census Bureau. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention was utilized to collect information regarding the Governance of each State’s Public Health Department. Health rankings were collected from “America’s Health Rankings” 2019 Annual report from the United Health Foundation. The U.S. News and World Report Education Rankings were utilized to provide information regarding the public education of each State. Exposure: Data were pulled on 3 separate dates: first on March 5th (baseline and pre-national emergency declaration (NED) for COVID-19), March 18th (week following NED), and March 25th (2 weeks after NED). In addition, a variable identifying the total change across platforms was also created. All data were collected at the State level. Main Outcome: Overall, the social media following of the state Public Health Departments was very low. There was a significant increase in the public interest in following the Public Health Departments during the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. Results: With the declaration of National Emergency, there was a 150% increase in overall public following of the State Public Health Departments in the U.S. The increase was most noted in the Midwest and South regions of the U.S. The overall following in the pandemic “hotspots,” such as New York, California, and Florida, was significantly lower. Interesting correlations were noted between various demographic variables, health, and education ranking of the States and the social media following of their Health Departments. Conclusion and Relevance: Social media following of Public Health Departments across all States of the U.S. was very low. Though, the social media following significantly increased during the early course of the COVID-19 pandemic, but it still remains low. Significant opportunity exists for Public Health Departments to improve social media use to engage the public better.


INFORMASI ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-122
Author(s):  
Nkiru Comfort Ezeh ◽  
Augustine Godwin Mboso

The Social Media has emerged as a new platform for discourses. It has no doubt provided people with easier and faster accessibility to information and has become an outlet for them to share their views on socio-political issues. It has also been observed that negative and hate comments seem to dominate on social networks used for social and political communication. Anchored on Public Sphere Theory, focus group discussions were conducted with undergraduate youths in South-east Nigeria examined on the issue of President Mohammadu Buhari’s referring to Nigerian youths as lazy, while speaking at the Commonwealth Business Forum in Westminster on 18th April 2018. This article, therefore, explored the opinions advanced in the discourse based on the principles of freedom of expression and responsibility. The study suggests that while Twitter platform was more objective in the discussion of the issue of the day because it allows the use of filters to ensure that contents posted on the platform adhere strictly to rules and fair usage; Facebook and Whatsapp trailed with abuses and hate comments. The study recommended that owners of blogs and media houses who now post their contents on the social media should coordinate comments on such platforms and continue developing mechanisms that work to regulate the quality of posted content.


2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-52
Author(s):  
Zbigniew Chmielewski ◽  
Krzysztof Szmyd

AbstractThe paper presents results of research related to familiarity and understanding of home hospice term and shows how the social media discourse of palliative care looks like. Answers and conclusions are crucial for palliative care organisations as their existence depends on donors financial support which engagement is strongly related to communication activities performed by those organisations.In the paper there has been presented opinions about public discussion about terminally ill children and its potential need for being treated as a taboo. The data whether futile medical care should be performed whatever the cost is also shown in the paper. Researchers asked also who should be responsible for executing management of hospices in Poland. The main conclusions focus on the necessity to intensify communication activities, especially by the professionals.


2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 59-68
Author(s):  
Fauzia Janjua ◽  
Syeda Aniqah Sabahat ◽  
Sara Anwar ◽  
Sehrish Aslam

The 21st-century world has seen several natural calamities in the form of widespread diseases such as SARS outbreak (2002-2004), swine flu pandemic (2009), and now the Covid-19.  The outbreak of coronavirus has put the world in a state of anxiety and fear. As a result, a considerable social myths content has been disembarked as a dynamic response to the pandemic. Like elsewhere, the social media discourse on Covid-19 myths is being constructed and consumed in Pakistan. Considering Bouchard's concept of configuration of social myths as either "strictly contextualized" or having "universal features with loose ties to social mechanism," the investigation of the configuration of social myths of Covid-19 in Pakistani social media is explored. Furthermore, the myths were analyzed for co-relation and interconnectedness through intertextuality. The study propounds that the social media discourse of dominant social actors hailing from religious, social, and philosophical domains construe locally contextualized ideas of Covid-19. The social actors' coalition of all social myths set the scene for a Pakistani CovidArchemyth, which is intertwined with peculiarities of Pakistani tradition and culture.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny L Davis ◽  
Tony Love

In the late spring of 2020, amid a global pandemic, George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis, Minnesota, triggering mass protests under the banner of the Black Lives Matter movement. We take this moment of coinciding crises as our point of analysis observed through the lens of concurrent hashtags on Twitter. Social media content both reflect and construct the social meanings of topics and events. We thus draw from social media to understand how George Floyd and Covid-19 inform and inflect each other, building a dataset from ~20,000 tweets that unite prevalent hashtags associated with each. Analyses reveal a repeating set of symbolic hooks—death, breath, masks, and voice—encompassing dense and competing narratives about justice and injustice, systemic inequality, degrading trust in institutions, and the changing identity of a nation. These narratives are anchored in the events under study and indexed through co-occurring social media registers. In addition to substantive findings, the study introduces and applies hashtag convergence, a novel methodological approach based on user-generated indexical pairings.


2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-202
Author(s):  
M Zainal Muttaqien

AbstractThe emergence of social media as a new channel of communication has produced a new form discourse which has different characteristics compared to the formerly established conventional discourses. These differences do not only lie in how the messages are delivered but also in their  structural components which contribute to the unity of the text, namely cohesion and coherence. Cohesion, as the marker of coherence, is realized by language units (words, phrases, or clauses) known as cohesive markers which indicate the relationship between parts of discourse either grammatically or lexically. This article aims at describing the composition and distribution of  cohesive markers within the Facebook conversations along with their roles in determining the characteristics of the discourse. The results show that the cohesive system of Facebook conversations are dominated by references, ellipses, repetitions, and conjunctions. The frequent appearances of certain referential cohesivemarkers indicate Facebook conversations as typical of interactive discourse whereas numerous ellipses and particular conjunctionsreflectthe informal mode of communication carried out through the social media.On the other hand, various repetitions show the existence of topical cohesionwithin the conversations.


2020 ◽  
Vol 210 ◽  
pp. 16001
Author(s):  
Elena Klemenova ◽  
Margarita Ereshchenko

We have attempted to analyse the features of communicative strategies of a media discourse. The paper describes the notions of “discourse”, “media discourse”, “social media discourse”, and “communicative strategies”. The research is performed using the social media texts collected by the authors. Up to date no linguistic investigations of communicative strategies used in social media discourse have been conducted. We have focused on news texts from information, news, educational, and entertaining platforms, in social networks. The most important thing is to identify the ways of communicative strategies generation and the methods of their association in a social media discourse. The article shows some typical features of a social media discourse. The subject of the research is a set of communicative strategies used during implementation of the communicative functions of texts. The purpose of the paper is to identify and organise communicative strategies, the characteristics of their use depending on the social text topic, and to review the impact of such a text. The main aim of the research is to study the social media discourse as one type of an institutional media discourse; to identify and describe the factors impacting its formation.


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