scholarly journals The Importance of Debiasing Social Media Data to Better Understand E-Cigarette-Related Attitudes and Behaviors

2016 ◽  
Vol 18 (8) ◽  
pp. e219 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jon-Patrick Allem ◽  
Emilio Ferrara
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Tyler Jimenez

The 'War on Drugs' exemplifies one way in which policing is metaphorically compared to war. As conceptual metaphor theory demonstrates, metaphors shape attitudes and behaviors toward the concept they are used to understand. It is then perhaps unsurprising that war metaphors for policing have become more common alongside the militarization of police. Still, no research has examined the link between police use of war metaphors and acquisition of military equipment. Using ecological and social media data, the study began to examine this link. Specifically, 241,084 social media posts from police departments (N = 80) were coded for the presence of war metaphors, which were then used to predict the amount of military equipment acquired through the federal 1033 Program. Building from conceptual metaphor theory, it was hypothesized that police use of war metaphors would be positively associated with their department acquisition of militarized equipment. The results did not support this hypothesis; potential reasons for this are considered. Exploratory analysis generated potentially interesting findings regarding police usage of war metaphors following acts of police violence and associations between death-related words and militarized equipment acquisitions.


2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen M. Carley ◽  
L. R. Carley ◽  
Jonathan Storrick

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anika Oellrich ◽  
George Gkotsis ◽  
Richard James Butler Dobson ◽  
Tim JP Hubbard ◽  
Rina Dutta

BACKGROUND Dementia is a growing public health concern with approximately 50 million people affected worldwide in 2017 and this number is expected to reach more than 131 million by 2050. The toll on caregivers and relatives cannot be underestimated as dementia changes family relationships, leaves people socially isolated, and affects the finances of all those involved. OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to explore using automated analysis (i) the age and gender of people who post to the social media forum Reddit about dementia diagnoses, (ii) the affected person and their diagnosis, (iii) relevant subreddits authors are posting to, (iv) the types of messages posted and (v) the content of these posts. METHODS We analysed Reddit posts concerning dementia diagnoses. We used a previously developed text analysis pipeline to determine attributes of the posts as well as their authors to characterise online communications about dementia diagnoses. The posts were also examined by manual curation for the diagnosis provided and the person affected. Furthermore, we investigated the communities these people engage in and assessed the contents of the posts with an automated topic gathering technique. RESULTS Our results indicate that the majority of posters in our data set are women, and it is mostly close relatives such as parents and grandparents that are mentioned. Both the communities frequented and topics gathered reflect not only the sufferer's diagnosis but also potential outcomes, e.g. hardships experienced by the caregiver. The trends observed from this dataset are consistent with findings based on qualitative review, validating the robustness of social media automated text processing. CONCLUSIONS This work demonstrates the value of social media data sources as a resource for in-depth studies of those affected by a dementia diagnosis and the potential to develop novel support systems based on their real time processing in line with the increasing digitalisation of medical care.


Author(s):  
Philip Habel ◽  
Yannis Theocharis

In the last decade, big data, and social media in particular, have seen increased popularity among citizens, organizations, politicians, and other elites—which in turn has created new and promising avenues for scholars studying long-standing questions of communication flows and influence. Studies of social media play a prominent role in our evolving understanding of the supply and demand sides of the political process, including the novel strategies adopted by elites to persuade and mobilize publics, as well as the ways in which citizens react, interact with elites and others, and utilize platforms to persuade audiences. While recognizing some challenges, this chapter speaks to the myriad of opportunities that social media data afford for evaluating questions of mobilization and persuasion, ultimately bringing us closer to a more complete understanding Lasswell’s (1948) famous maxim: “who, says what, in which channel, to whom, [and] with what effect.”


METRON ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paolo Mariani ◽  
Andrea Marletta

AbstractSocial media has become a widespread element of people’s everyday life, which is used to communicate and generate contents. Among the several ways to express a reaction to social media contents, the “Likes” are critical. Indeed, they convey preferences, which drive existing markets or allow the creation of new ones. Nevertheless, the appreciation indicators have some complex features, as for example the interpretation of the absence of “Likes”. In this case, the lack of approval may be considered as a specific behaviour. The present study aimed to define whether the absence of Likes may indicate the presence of a specific behaviour through the contextualization of the treatment of missing data applied to real cases. We provided a practical strategy for extracting more knowledge from social media data, whose synthesis raises several measurement problems. We proposed an approach based on the disambiguation of missing data in two modalities: “Dislike” and “Nothing”. Finally, a data pre-processing technique was suggested to increase the signal of social media data.


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