scholarly journals Policing the Pedal Rebels: A Case Study of Environmental Activism Under COVID-19

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Murray Lee
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Climate Change ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Mass Extinction ◽  
Civil Disobedience ◽  
Cultural Criminology ◽  
Environmental Protest ◽  
Nation States ◽  
New Phase

Australia, along with nation-states internationally, has entered a new phase of environmentally focused activism, with globalised, coordinated and social media–enabled environmental social movements seeking to address human-induced climate change and related issues such as the mass extinction of species and land clearing. Some environmental protest groups such as Extinction Rebellion (XR) have attracted significant political, media and popular commentary for their sometimes theatrical and disruptive forms of nonviolent protest and civil disobedience. Drawing on green and cultural criminology, this article constitutes an autoethnographic account of environmental protest during the final stages of the initial COVID-19 lockdown in NSW, Australia. It takes as a case study a small protest by an XR subgroup called the Pedal Rebels. The article explores the policing of environmental protest from an activist standpoint, highlighting the extraordinary police resources and powers mobilised to regulate a small peaceful group of ‘socially distanced’ protesters operating within the existing public health orders. It places an autoethnographic description of this protest in the context of policing practice and green and cultural criminology. Additionally, it outlines the way in which such policing is emboldened by changes to laws affecting environmental protest, making activism an increasingly risky activity.

Preparedness 3.0: Addressing the Future

2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (6) ◽  
pp. 728-729 ◽  
Author(s):  
Georges C. Benjamin
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Climate Change ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Infectious Diseases ◽  
Extreme Weather ◽  
Common Occurrence ◽  
Public Health Preparedness ◽  
Public Health Emergencies ◽  
State Sponsorship ◽  
The Future

ABSTRACTThe last 14 years has taught us that that we are facing a new reality; a reality in which public health emergencies are a common occurrence. Today, we live in a world with dangerous people without state sponsorship who are an enormous threat to our safety; one where emerging and reemerging infectious diseases are waiting to break out; a world where the benefits of globalization in trade, transportation, and social media brings threats to our communities faster and with a greater risk than ever before. Even climate change has entered into the preparedness equation, bringing with it the forces of nature in the form of extreme weather and its complications. (Disaster Med Public Health Preparedness. 2015;9:728–729)

scholarly journals Conflict and chaos: A case study of Ireland’s COVID-19 outbound travel market

2021 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 87-108
Author(s):  
Tony Johnston
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Crisis Management ◽  
Consumer Confidence ◽  
Operational Decisions ◽  
Societal Factors ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
Travel Industry ◽  
Desk Research

During the COVID-19 pandemic the international outbound travel market from Ireland collapsed, declining at one point by 94%. This case study paper explores the environment which framed the collapse in travel, positioning it as one of conflict and chaos. The main objective is to document and analyse the legal, industry and societal factors which may have contributed to the collapse, identifying the key regulations, decisions, metrics, and societal responses, and exploring their intersection with outbound tourism. Three areas of inquiry are explored, namely: 1) the legal instruments used by government to restrict travel, 2) operational decisions made by industry, and 3) societal and media response to the pandemic. Three findings are presented from the desk research. First, it is suggested that the conflicting agendas of government and public health, the mainstream media and the travel industry would be more effectively dealt with in private as opposed to via news articles, social media arguments, and openly published letters. Second, clarity of communication from all three bodies needs improvement due to its impact on consumer confidence. Finally, the article proposes lessons for government in relation to future crisis management situations regarding outbound travel.

Social Media, Political Mobilization, and Citizen Engagement

2017 ◽  
pp. 360-388
Author(s):  
Kenneth C. C. Yang ◽  
Yowei Kang
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Civil Disobedience ◽  
Trade Agreement ◽  
Political Mobilization ◽  
Resource Mobilization Theory ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
Mobilization Theory

On March 18, 2014, a group of student protestors raided and occupied the Legislative Yuan and later the Executive Yuan in Taiwan. The student-led movement lasted for about 3 weeks after Taiwan's President made significant concessions to change his non-transparent practices when signing the Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement (CSSTA) with People's Republic of China. Mostly labelled as a movement of civil disobedience against government's dealings with China, the 318 Sunflower Student Movement is viewed as an important step toward the deepening of Taiwan's democratization process. Its repercussions were felt in Hong-Kong and Macao where similar civil disobedience movements had emerged. On the basis of the resource mobilization theory (RMT), the authors used a combination of case study and thematic analysis methods to examine the role of social media in political mobilization in Taiwan. This chapter identified two major recurrent themes as follows: challenging mainstream media and mobilizing multi-movement resources.

How to Improve Public Health via Mining Social Media Platforms: A Case Study of Human Papillomaviruses (HPV)

2019 ◽  
pp. 207-231 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hansi Zhang ◽  
Christopher Wheldon ◽  
Cui Tao ◽  
Adam G. Dunn ◽  
Yi Guo ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Human Papillomaviruses ◽  
Social Media Platforms

scholarly journals Leishmaniasis and Climate Change—Case Study: Argentina

2012 ◽  
Vol 2012 ◽  
pp. 1-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oscar Daniel Salomón ◽  
María Gabriela Quintana ◽  
Andrea Verónica Mastrángelo ◽  
María Soledad Fernández
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Climate Change ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Mitigation Strategies ◽  
Vector Borne Diseases ◽  
Scale Models ◽  
Vector Borne

Vector-borne diseases closely associated with the environment, such as leishmaniases, have been a usual argument about the deleterious impact of climate change on public health. From the biological point of view interaction of different variables has different and even conflicting effects on the survival of vectors and the probability transmission of pathogens. The results on ecoepidemiology of leishmaniasis in Argentina related to climate variables at different scales of space and time are presented. These studies showed that the changes in transmission due to change or increase in frequency and intensity of climatic instability were expressed through changes in the probability of vector-human reservoir effective contacts. These changes of contact in turn are modulated by both direct effects on the biology and ecology of the organisms involved, as by perceptions and changes in the behavior of the human communities at risk. Therefore, from the perspective of public health and state policy, and taking into account the current nonlinear increased velocity of climate change, we concluded that discussing the uncertainties of large-scale models will have lower impact than to develop-validate mitigation strategies to be operative at local level, and compatibles with sustainable development, conservation biodiversity, and respect for cultural diversity.

scholarly journals Information Sharing through Twitter by Public Health care Institution during COVID-19 Pandemic: A Case Study of AIIMS, Raipur

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 189-192
Author(s):  
Shiv Shankar Sharma ◽  
Daljeet Kaur ◽  
Taranjeet Kaur Chawla ◽  
Vaishali Kapoor
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Health Care ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Sentiment Analysis ◽  
Public Health Care ◽  
Institutional Image ◽  
Health Care Institutions ◽  
Media Platform ◽  
Two Phases

Background: During the time of COVID 19, public health care institutions have used social media to inform and aware society. Aim & Objective: To analyze how Public Health Care Institutes conveyed the health information and messages through social media platform- Twitter during COVID 19, and analyzing its impact through sentiment analysis of comments. Material & Methods: The Thematic and sentiment analysis method has been used to analyze the data of the Twitter handle of AIIMS, Raipur in two phases; January-March 2020, and April-June 2020.  Results: The analysis shows that the sharing of COVID-19 updates on AIIMS, Raipur Twitter handle increased the followers 15 times from 2,000+ in March 2020 to 30,000+ in June 2020, and the sentiment analysis reflects that COVID related updates received 96.7 % positive comments. Conclusion: The case study finds that transparent and informative message sharing through social media by public health care institutions can create an effective channel of communication. This results in a positive institutional image.

scholarly journals Use of Health Belief Model–Based Deep Learning Classifiers for COVID-19 Social Media Content to Examine Public Perceptions of Physical Distancing: Model Development and Case Study (Preprint)

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aravind Sesagiri Raamkumar ◽  
Soon Guan Tan ◽  
Hwee Lin Wee
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Public Perceptions ◽  
Perceived Barriers ◽  
Classification Models ◽  
Perceived Severity ◽  
The Public ◽  
Health Authorities ◽  
Public Health Authorities

BACKGROUND Public health authorities have been recommending interventions such as physical distancing and face masks, to curtail the transmission of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) within the community. Public perceptions toward such interventions should be identified to enable public health authorities to effectively address valid concerns. The Health Belief Model (HBM) has been used to characterize user-generated content from social media during previous outbreaks, with the aim of understanding the health behaviors of the public. OBJECTIVE This study is aimed at developing and evaluating deep learning–based text classification models for classifying social media content posted during the COVID-19 outbreak, using the four key constructs of the HBM. We will specifically focus on content related to the physical distancing interventions put forth by public health authorities. We intend to test the model with a real-world case study. METHODS The data set for this study was prepared by analyzing Facebook comments that were posted by the public in response to the COVID-19–related posts of three public health authorities: the Ministry of Health of Singapore (MOH), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Public Health England. The comments made in the context of physical distancing were manually classified with a Yes/No flag for each of the four HBM constructs: perceived severity, perceived susceptibility, perceived barriers, and perceived benefits. Using a curated data set of 16,752 comments, gated recurrent unit–based recurrent neural network models were trained and validated for text classification. Accuracy and binary cross-entropy loss were used to evaluate the model. Specificity, sensitivity, and balanced accuracy were used to evaluate the classification results in the MOH case study. RESULTS The HBM text classification models achieved mean accuracy rates of 0.92, 0.95, 0.91, and 0.94 for the constructs of perceived susceptibility, perceived severity, perceived benefits, and perceived barriers, respectively. In the case study with MOH Facebook comments, specificity was above 96% for all HBM constructs. Sensitivity was 94.3% and 90.9% for perceived severity and perceived benefits, respectively. In addition, sensitivity was 79.6% and 81.5% for perceived susceptibility and perceived barriers, respectively. The classification models were able to accurately predict trends in the prevalence of the constructs for the time period examined in the case study. CONCLUSIONS The deep learning–based text classifiers developed in this study help to determine public perceptions toward physical distancing, using the four key constructs of HBM. Health officials can make use of the classification model to characterize the health behaviors of the public through the lens of social media. In future studies, we intend to extend the model to study public perceptions of other important interventions by public health authorities.

Credible to Whom?

2017 ◽  
pp. 142-161
Author(s):  
Nathan Rodriguez
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Search Engine ◽  
Online Search ◽  
Case Study Approach ◽  
Study Approach ◽  
Active Choice ◽  
Echo Chamber ◽  
Chamber Effect

This chapter adopts a case study approach to examine the echo chamber effect online. Individuals cobble together personalized newsfeeds by active choice and those choices are often accompanied by subtle manipulations in social media and online search engine algorithms that may shape and constrain the parameters of information on a given topic. In this chapter, the author studied vaccine-hesitant discourse in an online forum over a five-year period. Those conversations exhibited characteristics of what would be considered an echo chamber, as defined by Jamieson and Cappella (2008). The implications of this case study suggest that the echo chamber within the realm of vaccination can lead individuals toward content and information of dubious veracity, with significant implications for public health.

Building Trust through Social Media in Times of Crisis: Cultural Persuasion, Citizen News, and the Cultural Affordances of Blogs

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Ostertag
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Cultural Sociology ◽  
Culturally Specific ◽  
Building Trust ◽  
Cultural Codes ◽  
Mass Migration

Research on trust and news tends to focus on professional news (agents, organizations, institutions), ignores the content of news, and takes place during relatively settled times. This article seeks to remedy these gaps by examining how citizens used blogs to make and share news during a natural disaster and its aftermath. It draws on a case study of blogging in the wake of hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and examines the perspective of blog users to understand how they built trust in each other and in their shared realities of the recovery and rebuilding periods. It draws on cultural sociology to illustrate how civil and anticivil cultural codes, embodied in culturally specific referents, were drawn upon to construct news messages and messengers, and by extension, trust in each other and a grounded ontological understanding of reality. It argues that the cultural affordances of the blog platform were helpful in users’ ability to build both forms of trust. It concludes with implications for emerging crises of climate change, global pandemics and the mass migration these produce.

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