scholarly journals The social amplification and attenuation of COVID-19 risk perception shaping mask wearing behavior: A longitudinal twitter analysis

PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (9) ◽  
pp. e0257428
Author(s):  
Suellen Hopfer ◽  
Emilia J. Fields ◽  
Yuwen Lu ◽  
Ganesh Ramakrishnan ◽  
Ted Grover ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Risk Perception ◽  
Risk Mitigation ◽  
Qualitative Content Analysis ◽  
News Source ◽  
Communication Processes ◽  
The Social ◽  
Public Offering ◽  
Social Amplification ◽  
Over Time

Introduction Twitter represents a mainstream news source for the American public, offering a valuable vehicle for learning how citizens make sense of pandemic health threats like Covid-19. Masking as a risk mitigation measure became controversial in the US. The social amplification risk framework offers insight into how a risk event interacts with psychological, social, institutional, and cultural communication processes to shape Covid-19 risk perception. Methods Qualitative content analysis was conducted on 7,024 mask tweets reflecting 6,286 users between January 24 and July 7, 2020, to identify how citizens expressed Covid-19 risk perception over time. Descriptive statistics were computed for (a) proportion of tweets using hyperlinks, (b) mentions, (c) hashtags, (d) questions, and (e) location. Results Six themes emerged regarding how mask tweets amplified and attenuated Covid-19 risk: (a) severity perceptions (18.0%) steadily increased across 5 months; (b) mask effectiveness debates (10.7%) persisted; (c) who is at risk (26.4%) peaked in April and May 2020; (d) mask guidelines (15.6%) peaked April 3, 2020, with federal guidelines; (e) political legitimizing of Covid-19 risk (18.3%) steadily increased; and (f) mask behavior of others (31.6%) composed the largest discussion category and increased over time. Of tweets, 45% contained a hyperlink, 40% contained mentions, 33% contained hashtags, and 16.5% were expressed as a question. Conclusions Users ascribed many meanings to mask wearing in the social media information environment revealing that COVID-19 risk was expressed in a more expanded range than objective risk. The simultaneous amplification and attenuation of COVID-19 risk perception on social media complicates public health messaging about mask wearing.

Strange Frame Fellows: The Evolution of Discursive Framing in the Opt-Out Testing Movement

2021 ◽  
Vol 123 (5) ◽  
pp. 1-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Paquin Morel
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Public Schools ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
Qualitative Content Analysis ◽  
Research Question ◽  
The Public ◽  
Local Schools ◽  
Opt Out ◽  
Open Coding ◽  
Over Time

Background/context In recent years, opposition to accountability policies and associated testing has manifested in widespread boycotts of annual tests—mobilized as the “opt-out movement.” A central challenge facing any movement is the need to recruit and mobilize participants. Key to this process is framing—a discursive tactic in which activists present social issues as problems that require collective action to solve. Such framing often relies on compatible political and ideological commitments among activists and potential recruits. Yet the opt-out movement has successfully mobilized widespread boycotts in diverse communities. How have participants in the movement framed issues relating to testing and accountability? Purpose/objective/research question/focus of study I explore the discursive tactics of participants in the opt-out movement by analyzing how they frame issues related to testing and accountability over time. I ask two research questions: (1) What frames did participants in opt-out-aligned social media groups use to convince others that standardized accountability tests are a problem and build support for the movement? (2) To what extent and how did the deployment of frames change over time? Research design I conducted a mixed-methods study combining qualitative content analysis to identify frames and computational analysis to describe their co-deployment over time. Data collection and analysis I compiled a text corpus of posts to opt-out-aligned social media pages from 2010–2014. I analyzed posts using open coding to identify frames used by participants in online communities. Frames were categorized by their orientation—the general way in which they framed the problem of testing and accountability. I then analyzed the co-deployment of frames using network analysis and hierarchical clustering. Conclusions/recommendations The longitudinal analysis of frames reveals key differences in the frames used by participants. While more politically oriented frames—those characterizing testing as a social issue affecting the public schools at large—were common in early stages of the movement, less overtly political frames—those characterizing testing as an individual issue affecting children and local schools or a technical issue—became more prominent over time. Over time, socially oriented frames became decoupled from other frames, showing independent patterns of deployment. This suggests that the movement may have benefited from de-emphasizing politically oriented frames, but that it lacked an overarching shared narrative, which has the potential to limit how it might affect accountability policies and testing.

scholarly journals Degrees of Freedom: Exploring Agency, Narratives, and Technological Affordances in the #TakeAKnee Controversy

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 205630511982612 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith E. Rosenbaum
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Content Analysis ◽  
Degrees Of Freedom ◽  
Qualitative Content Analysis ◽  
Structuration Theory ◽  
The Social ◽  
American National Identity ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Media Narratives ◽  
Technological Affordances

This study extends current research into social media platforms as counterpublic spaces by examining how the social media narratives produced by the #TakeAKnee controversy negotiate technological affordances and existing discourses surrounding American national identity. Giddens’ Structuration Theory is used to explore the nature of user agency on social media platforms and the extent to which this agency is constrained or enabled by the interplay between the systems and structures that guide social media use. Exploratory qualitative content analysis was used to analyze and compare tweets and Instagram posts using the #TakeAKnee hashtag shared in September 2017. Results showed that narratives are dominated by four themes, freedom, unity, equality and justice, and respect and honor. Users actively employ technological affordances to create highly personalized meanings, affirming that agency operates at the intersection of reflexivity and self-efficacy.

scholarly journals Algorithmic Closeness in Mourning: Vernaculars of the Hashtag #grief on TikTok

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 205630512110423
Author(s):  
Moa Eriksson Krutrök
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Content Analysis ◽  
Qualitative Content Analysis ◽  
Social Connections ◽  
Safe Spaces ◽  
Ranking Algorithms ◽  
Ranking Systems ◽  
The Social ◽  
Previous User ◽  
The Way

This study looks at how mourning is expressed using the hashtag #grief on the social media app TikTok using qualitative content analysis. In a dataset of 100 TikTok videos, this article explores how the TikTok ranking algorithms, which orders content based on previous user engagements, may connect people in mourning across the platform and how these platform-enabled interactions may shape grief expressions. The study shows how grief was narrated on TikTok, which sociotechnical templates (such as duets, stitches, and audios) were incorporated into such expressions, and how these expressions of grief challenged societal mourning norms. This article ends with a discussion about how different subcultural norms on TikTok are linked to the way in which ranking algorithms create social connections across the platform. This study proposes that the “algorithmic closeness” of TikTok users in grief allows them to challenge societal mourning norms in imagined safe spaces, shaped by the algorithmic ranking systems on the platform.

scholarly journals Maintenance or Change? Examining the Reinforcing Spiral Between Social Media News Use and Populist Attitudes

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sandy Schumann ◽  
Fabian Thomas ◽  
Franziska Ehrke ◽  
Tisa Bertlich ◽  
Julia Christina Dupont
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Longitudinal Survey ◽  
Selection Effects ◽  
Cross Sectional Survey ◽  
Extreme Position ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Attitude Polarization ◽  
News Source ◽  
Over Time ◽  
News Use

Citizens around the world increasingly express support for populism. Here, we apply the reinforcing spirals model to examine whether, and how, social media news use shapes populist attitudes over time. Specifically, we assess if using social media as a news source serves to maintain existing populist attitudes or facilitates a shift in attitudes to a more extreme position. A cross-sectional survey (N1 = 195) highlighted a positive correlation between social media news use and populist attitudes. A four-wave longitudinal survey (N2 = 386) further showed that this relationship reflects media and selection effects. Over a period of three months, more frequent social media news use predicted stronger populist attitudes at subsequent measuring points. In addition, higher levels of populist attitudes were related to more frequent social media news consumption in the following waves. However, the frequency of social media news use did not change over time and populist attitudes did not become stronger during the study period. Taken together, the findings indicate that social media news use contributed to the maintenance of populist attitudes at a stable level. There is no evidence to suggest social media news use predicted more extreme populist attitudes. We discuss these results with respect to the (potentially continued) rise of populism; we also critically reflect on the phenomenon of attitude polarization online.

scholarly journals Acute Stress Reduces the Social Amplification of Risk Perception

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathalie F. Popovic ◽  
Ulrike U. Bentele ◽  
Jens C. Pruessner ◽  
Mehdi Moussaïd ◽  
Wolfgang Gaissmaier
Keyword(s):  
Risk Perception ◽  
Acute Stress ◽  
Social Amplification Of Risk ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Amplification

Collective Narrative Expertise and the Narbs of Social Media

2012 ◽  
pp. 1-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ananda Mitra
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Knowledge Creation ◽  
Theoretical Basis ◽  
Narrative Construction ◽  
Digital Environment ◽  
Unique Form ◽  
Epistemological Question ◽  
The Social ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Collective Narrative

A fundamental epistemological question that has been the focus of much deliberation over time is: how do we know what we know? One of the answers to this question has been found in the theories of narrative asserting that humans learn through stories, ranging from religious epics to personal anecdotes. The social media phenomenon offers a unique form of narration that utilizes “narbs,” narrative bits that tell the stories of specific individuals who may be, but often are not, traditional experts. Yet, as a collection, these narbs could become the authoritative narrative about a particular issue where expertise is located in the collective. This chapter examines the theoretical basis of knowledge creation through narrative, and how the narbs of social media users are creating dynamic bodies of information. The chapter offers a lexicon for categorizing narbs and provides an analytical frame for examining them. The overall aim of this chapter is to demonstrate that interaction and new modes of gathering and disseminating information and knowledge in the digital environment require different and emergent expertise in narrative construction and interpretation.

Round-trip agenda setting: Tracking the intermedia process over time in the ice bucket challenge

Journalism ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 18 (10) ◽  
pp. 1292-1308 ◽  
Author(s):  
S Mo Jang ◽  
Yong Jin Park ◽  
Hoon Lee
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Agenda Setting ◽  
Round Trip ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
Intermedia Agenda Setting ◽  
The Social ◽  
Issue Attention ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Ice Bucket Challenge

Despite the social media’s agenda-setting power, the literature provides little understanding of how social media agendas survive and last long enough to trigger substantial public discussions. This study investigates this issue by tracking the ice bucket challenge campaign over an 18-week period. This article claims that the pattern of the intermedia process evolves over time along with the issue-attention cycle. We observed a round-trip intermedia agenda setting where the direction is reversed as the agenda waxes and wanes. Both social and mainstream media continued to generate a heightened level of issue attention after the buzz was cooled down.

scholarly journals It’s Getting Personal: Personalisation of political campaigns in four Prague districts during the 2018 Czech Senate elections

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 279-308
Author(s):  
Olga Brunnerová
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Qualitative Content Analysis ◽  
Political Campaigns ◽  
Capital City ◽  
Senate Elections ◽  
The Public ◽  
Electoral Campaigns ◽  
Social Media Site ◽  
The Social ◽  
Quantitative And Qualitative Methods

AbstractIn October 2018 Senate elections were held in the Czech Republic. In the capital city of Prague, 41 candidates – both party members and independents – contested for the votes of the electorate of four districts. The goal of this article is to analyse the electoral campaigns which were conducted within these four districts in the online sphere of the social media site Facebook. Through complementary quantitative and qualitative methods, this text focuses its attention on the communication of the candidates themselves, but also on the reactions of the electorate in the environment of social media. Employing qualitative content analysis of the topics addressed by the candidates, sentiment analysis of user commentaries and quantitative analysis of posting frequency and followership, this article examines whether the candidates who led an active personalised campaign were more successful than the candidates who communicated with the public only sporadically and with less personalisation. The aim is to explore how the campaigns of successful candidates were conducted and to accentuate that social media is becoming more important in the campaigns of individual candidates, but that they are not a panacea for non-partisan candidates without an established supporter base and financial resources.

scholarly journals Assessing the Social Media User’s Credibility Rating of Shared Content, and its Utilization in Decision Making

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-199
Author(s):  
Hadiza Wada
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Social Exchange ◽  
Age Groups ◽  
Simple Random Sampling ◽  
Shared Content ◽  
News Source ◽  
The Social ◽  
Credibility Rating ◽  
Credible Information

This study seeks to ascertain the degree to which people rely on unprofessionally processed information from social media to make decisions or take critical actions. Professional media, in this case, refers to the traditional broadcast and print media who have been in the business of professionally processing and authenticating information for their audiences. While social media represent the various platforms for social exchange of information. Relevant to this study is the social media’s ability to reach multitudes of people with unsubstantiated information. The methodology employed is simple random sampling, using questionnaire as an instrument. 350 respondents provided input using three age ranges, 20-35, 36-50, and 50 and above. The results show social media usage as the only news source for the youngest age group at 38%. The 50 plus years mainly rely on professional media. While all three age groups admitted to sharing of unsubstantiated information at 68%, only 30% admit to using critical information from social media. Most importantly, the findings indicate; where prevalence and availability tends to overwhelm users, taking the time to seek more credible information takes a back seat, even in cases where the information sought is critical to decision making and use. Doi: 10.28991/esj-2021-01269 Full Text: PDF

scholarly journals A Study on celebrity cosmetic brand content analysis and social media engagement: The case of Fenty Beauty’s product

2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-86
Author(s):  
Anishametra A/P Saravanan ◽  
Wardatul Hayat Adnan
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Content Analysis ◽  
Social Identity Theory ◽  
Qualitative Content Analysis ◽  
Process Analysis ◽  
Cosmetic Industry ◽  
The Social ◽  
Rapid Changes ◽  
Social Media Engagement ◽  
Marketing Tool

The cosmetic industry has seen an explosive growth in the past few years. Although many beauty conglomerates are leading the forefront of the global cosmetics industry, the beauty standards by them set are usually Eurocentric in nature. However, rapid changes with Fenty Beauty first appearance in cosmetic industry. The brand took the world by storm when they introduced an idea that resonated with a large community of makeup enthusiasts. Despite being in its infancy stage, the brand has made plenty of ripples to change the industry for the better through its inclusivity approach. The present study aims to gain a greater understanding on the brand’s social media engagement with their followers on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube as well as classifying the brand’s followers according to the social identity theory. Qualitative content analysis was applied in the present study to gain a better understanding of Fenty Beauty’s social media engagement efforts with their followers. The coding scheme implemented is adopted of Bales’ Interaction Process Analysis (IPA) Model to study how followers of the brand react to social media posts made by Fenty Beauty. The findings of the present study will be useful to the cosmetic industry as it will proof the potential of social media as a powerful marketing tool. The findings of the present research will be beneficial to companies in the cosmetic industry and marketing practitioners provides an insight as to what motivates online users to engage and interact with a brand.

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