scholarly journals TWITTERING RESEARCH, CALLING OUT AND CANCELING CULTURES: A STORY AND SOME QUESTIONS

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Suzanne De Castell ◽  
Helen W. Kennedy ◽  
Sarah Atkinson ◽  
Jennifer Jenson ◽  
Colleen Thumlert
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Media Ecology ◽  
Research Network ◽  
Data Sets ◽  
Written Responses ◽  
Personal Consequences ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Potential Benefits ◽  
The Impact

This is an analysis of how Twitter played a significant, agentive and accountable role in the difficult birth and premature unravelling of a government-funded international feminist research network. We situate this case study and this process of initiation and annihilation within the broader context within which social media platforms are a critical site of intensive affective discursive practices through which individual and institutional reputations can be made and unmade, frequently with far reaching professional and or personal consequences. To date there has been little academic study of both the broader implications of the potential benefits of social media for academic networking and the perils. Two data sets are analyzed comparatively, the first, detailed written responses from an in-person workshop designed explicitly to gather feedback on the research network; the second a set of tweets that erupted over a number of days shortly after that event. Content analysis of both data sets shows the impact of a small, localized Twitter event on an international network of researchers, demonstrating the speed and thoroughness with which decades of research and collaboration can be undone, and raising larger questions about the sustainability of culturally precarious trajectories of work -- in this case feminist work -- within Twitter’s increasingly hegemonic media ecology.

Social Media as Alternative Public Sphere for Citizen Participation and Protest in National Politics in Zimbabwe

2018 ◽  
pp. 17-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Collen Sabao ◽  
Tendai Owen Chikara
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Political Participation ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Citizen Participation ◽  
The Political ◽  
National Politics ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
The Impact

The chapter examines and discusses the role and communicative potential of social media based platforms in citizen political participation and protests in Zimbabwe specifically focusing on the #thisflag movement on Facebook, Twitter and Whatsapp. #thisflag is a social media-based platform that rose to challenge the Zimbabwean government over the political and economic decay as well as rampant corruption characterising the country contemporarily. While a new phenomenon to Zimbabwe and Zimbabwean politics, the impact and communicative potential of social media as an alternative public sphere was recently tested in nationwide protest stayaway organised through the Facebook and Twitter movement under the #thisflag handle/brand. This chapter discusses the manners in which such social media platforms impact national politics in Zimbabwe as well as globally, specifically looking at the #thisflag movement as a case study.

Social Media as Alternative Public Sphere for Citizen Participation and Protest in National Politics in Zimbabwe

2020 ◽  
pp. 772-786
Author(s):  
Collen Sabao ◽  
Tendai Owen Chikara
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Political Participation ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Citizen Participation ◽  
The Political ◽  
National Politics ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
The Impact

The chapter examines and discusses the role and communicative potential of social media based platforms in citizen political participation and protests in Zimbabwe specifically focusing on the #thisflag movement on Facebook, Twitter and Whatsapp. #thisflag is a social media-based platform that rose to challenge the Zimbabwean government over the political and economic decay as well as rampant corruption characterising the country contemporarily. While a new phenomenon to Zimbabwe and Zimbabwean politics, the impact and communicative potential of social media as an alternative public sphere was recently tested in nationwide protest stayaway organised through the Facebook and Twitter movement under the #thisflag handle/brand. This chapter discusses the manners in which such social media platforms impact national politics in Zimbabwe as well as globally, specifically looking at the #thisflag movement as a case study.

scholarly journals The Impact of Social Media Engagement from a Pathology Department During COVID

2021 ◽  
Vol 156 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. S163-S164
Author(s):  
C Crowe
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Full Time ◽  
University Of Alabama ◽  
Staff Members ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Twitter Account ◽  
Media Channels ◽  
The University ◽  
The Impact

Abstract Introduction/Objective The events of the past year brought into stark relief the importance and impact of social media and digital communications for pathology departments as managed by an intra-departmental team of communications professionals. The University of Alabama at Birmingham Department of Pathology is home to nearly 100 faculty, more than 200 staff members and close to 40 trainees. The department’s internal communications team consists of a director of communications and content coordinator, both full time employees. Prior to the COVID pandemic, the team hosted departmental Twitter and Facebook accounts. During the course of the year, we added Instagram and LinkedIn accounts, as well as a YouTube channel. These vehicles provided multiple platforms for communicating our messages, relating to COVID and promoting regular news and updates broadly, to both internal and external audiences. Methods/Case Report We created LinkedIn and Instagram accounts in July 2020, to round out our social media platforms. We use Sprout Social to manage our various accounts. Results (if a Case Study enter NA) For the timeframe of March 2020–2021 our @UABPathology Twitter account had a total of 933 published posts, and 1,022,785 total impressions, for 3,889 followers. Total engagements with the posts were 48,420, with 2,301 post link clicks. For the same timeframe, our nascent @UABPathology Instagram account earned 56,662 impressions, and 3,329 total engagements, for a 5.9% engagement rate. Most experts agree that a good engagement rate is between 1 and 5%. Conclusion Our departmental social media accounts generated high impact engagements with an audience primarily in the demographic of our target for trainee and young faculty recruits, ages 25-34, in addition to broadly disseminating our department’s ongoing news and updates during the COVID pandemic. The impact of effectively communicating through social media channels is measurable, and will continue to grow the reputation of the department as a top-tier clinical, research and educational program in the field.

scholarly journals Investigating the impact of pre-processing techniques and pre-trained word embeddings in detecting Arabic health information on social media

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yahya Albalawi ◽  
Jim Buckley ◽  
Nikola S. Nikolov
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Deep Learning ◽  
Comprehensive Evaluation ◽  
Classification Problem ◽  
Data Sets ◽  
Word Embeddings ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Lower Accuracy ◽  
Health Related ◽  
The Impact

AbstractThis paper presents a comprehensive evaluation of data pre-processing and word embedding techniques in the context of Arabic document classification in the domain of health-related communication on social media. We evaluate 26 text pre-processings applied to Arabic tweets within the process of training a classifier to identify health-related tweets. For this task we use the (traditional) machine learning classifiers KNN, SVM, Multinomial NB and Logistic Regression. Furthermore, we report experimental results with the deep learning architectures BLSTM and CNN for the same text classification problem. Since word embeddings are more typically used as the input layer in deep networks, in the deep learning experiments we evaluate several state-of-the-art pre-trained word embeddings with the same text pre-processing applied. To achieve these goals, we use two data sets: one for both training and testing, and another for testing the generality of our models only. Our results point to the conclusion that only four out of the 26 pre-processings improve the classification accuracy significantly. For the first data set of Arabic tweets, we found that Mazajak CBOW pre-trained word embeddings as the input to a BLSTM deep network led to the most accurate classifier with F1 score of 89.7%. For the second data set, Mazajak Skip-Gram pre-trained word embeddings as the input to BLSTM led to the most accurate model with F1 score of 75.2% and accuracy of 90.7% compared to F1 score of 90.8% achieved by Mazajak CBOW for the same architecture but with lower accuracy of 70.89%. Our results also show that the performance of the best of the traditional classifier we trained is comparable to the deep learning methods on the first dataset, but significantly worse on the second dataset.

scholarly journals A Tale of Two Disasters

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. 694-694
Author(s):  
Tammy Mermelstein
Keyword(s):  
Older Adults ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Interest Group ◽  
Media Analysis ◽  
Ice Storm ◽  
Social Media Analysis ◽  
Individual Survival ◽  
Social Media Platforms

Abstract Preparing for or experiencing a disaster is never easy, but how leaders communicate with older adults can ease a situation or make it exponentially worse. This case study describes two disasters in the same city: Hurricane Harvey and the 2018 Houston Texas Ice Storm and the variation in messaging provided to and regarding older adults. For example, during Hurricane Harvey, the primary pre-disaster message was self-preparedness. During the storm, messages were also about individual survival. Statements such as “do not [climb into your attic] unless you have an ax or means to break through,” generated additional fear for older adults and loved ones. Yet, when an ice storm paralyzed Houston a few months later, public messaging had a strong “check on your elderly neighbors” component. This talk will explore how messaging for these events impacted older adults through traditional and social media analysis, and describe how social media platforms assisted people with rescue and recovery. Part of a symposium sponsored by Disasters and Older Adults Interest Group.

scholarly journals Developing a social media strategy for R&D in energy efficiency – a case study in progress

2019 ◽  
Vol 116 ◽  
pp. 00006
Author(s):  
Elmar Bartlmae ◽  
Luis Arboledas-Lérida ◽  
Natalie Höppner
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Energy Efficiency ◽  
Research And Development ◽  
Online Tool ◽  
Assessment And Evaluation ◽  
Evaluation Procedures ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Social Media Strategy

Social Media platforms are increasingly receiving attention from scholars, as they are presumed to be both useful tools for undertaking professional assignments and a medium for engaging with large audiences and communities, within and outside academia. Additionally, these novel practices online need proper assessment and evaluation procedures. This paper aims to address the possibilities and challenges for niche research and development (R&D) projects in communicating their research via social media. The authors applied a seven-step social media strategy to an ongoing energy efficiency case study and discuss an online tool for monitoring the respective impact on social media.

scholarly journals 1414. #Vaccine Twitter Influencers: is it Just About Reach and Followers?

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. S714-S715
Author(s):  
Jean-Etienne Poirrier ◽  
Theodore Caputi ◽  
John Ayers ◽  
Mark Dredze ◽  
Sara Poston ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Standard Deviation ◽  
Small Proportion ◽  
The United States ◽  
Research Support ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Media Messages ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
The Impact

Abstract Background A small number of powerful users (“influencers”) dominates conversations on social media platforms: less than 1% of Twitter accounts have at least 3,000 followers and even fewer have hundreds of thousands or millions of followers. Beyond simple metrics (number of tweets, retweets...) little is known about these “influencers”, particularly in relation to their role in shaping online narratives about vaccines. Our goal was to describe influential Twitter accounts that are driving conversations about vaccines and present new metrics of influence. Methods Using publicly-available data from Twitter, we selected posts from 1-Jan-2016 to 31-Dec-2018 and extracted the top 5% of accounts tweeting about vaccines with the most followers. Using automated classifiers, we determined the location of these accounts, and grouped them into those that primarily tweet pro- versus anti-vaccine content. We further characterized the demographics of these influencer accounts. Results From 25,381 vaccine-related tweets available in our sample representing 10,607 users, 530 accounts represented the top 5% by number of followers. These accounts had on average 1,608,637 followers (standard deviation=5,063,421) and 340,390 median followers. Among the accounts for which sentiment was successfully estimated by the classifier, 10.4% (n=55) posted anti-vaccine content and 33.6% (n=178) posted pro-vaccine content. Of the 55 anti-vaccine accounts, 50% (n=18) of the accounts for which location was successfully determined were from the United States. Of the 178 pro-vaccine accounts, 42.5% (n=54) were from the United States. Conclusion This study showed that only a small proportion of Twitter accounts (A) post about vaccines and (B) have a high follower count and post anti-vaccine content. Further analysis of these users may help researchers and policy makers better understand how to amplify the impact of pro-vaccine social media messages. Disclosures Jean-Etienne Poirrier, PhD, MBA, The GSK group of companies (Employee, Shareholder) Theodore Caputi, PhD, Good Analytics Inc. (Consultant) John Ayers, PhD, GSK (Grant/Research Support) Mark Dredze, PhD, Bloomberg LP (Consultant)Good Analytics (Consultant) Sara Poston, PharmD, The GlaxoSmithKline group of companies (Employee, Shareholder) Cosmina Hogea, PhD, GlaxoSmithKline (Employee, Shareholder)

Understanding the Experiences of Anger in the Onset and Progression of Psoriasis: A Qualitative Study Using Social Media (Preprint)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olivia Hughes ◽  
Rachael Hunter
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Psychosocial Interventions ◽  
Skin Condition ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Chronic Skin ◽  
Skin Conditions ◽  
The Impact

BACKGROUND Psoriasis is a chronic inflammatory skin condition, which can be affected by stress. Living with psoriasis can trigger negative emotions, which may influence quality of life. OBJECTIVE This study explored the experiences of people with psoriasis with attention to the potential role of anger in the onset and progression of the chronic skin condition. METHODS Semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted with twelve participants (n=5 females, n=7 males) recruited online from an advert on a patient charity’s social media platforms. Data were transcribed and analysed using thematic analysis. RESULTS Four key themes were identified: (1) ‘I get really angry with the whole situation:’ anger at the self and others, (2) the impact of anger on psoriasis: angry skin, (3) shared experiences of distress, and (4) moving past anger to affirmation. CONCLUSIONS Findings suggest that anger can have a perceived impact on psoriasis through contributing to sensory symptoms and unhelpful coping cycles and point to a need for enhanced treatment with more psychological support. The findings also highlight the continued stigma which exists for people living with skin conditions and how this may contribute to, and sustain, anger for those individuals. Future research could usefully focus on developing targeted psychosocial interventions to promote healthy emotional coping with psoriasis.

scholarly journals Quantifying and contextualizing the impact of bioRxiv preprints through automated social media audience segmentation

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jedidiah Carlson ◽  
Kelley Harris
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Research Evaluation ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
Audience Segmentation ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Game Developers ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Media Audience

AbstractEngagement with scientific manuscripts is frequently facilitated by Twitter and other social media platforms. As such, the demographics of a paper’s social media audience provide a wealth of information about how scholarly research is transmitted, consumed, and interpreted by online communities. By paying attention to public perceptions of their publications, scientists can learn whether their research is stimulating positive scholarly and public thought. They can also become aware of potentially negative patterns of interest from groups that misinterpret their work in harmful ways, either willfully or unintentionally, and devise strategies for altering their messaging to mitigate these impacts. In this study, we collected 331,696 Twitter posts referencing 1,800 highly tweeted bioRxiv preprints and leveraged topic modeling to infer the characteristics of various communities engaging with each preprint on Twitter. We agnostically learned the characteristics of these audience sectors from keywords each user’s followers provide in their Twitter biographies. We estimate that 96% of the preprints analyzed are dominated by academic audiences on Twitter, suggesting that social media attention does not always correspond to greater public exposure. We further demonstrate how our audience segmentation method can quantify the level of interest from non-specialist audience sectors such as mental health advocates, dog lovers, video game developers, vegans, bitcoin investors, conspiracy theorists, journalists, religious groups, and political constituencies. Surprisingly, we also found that 10% of the highly tweeted preprints analyzed have sizable (>5%) audience sectors that are associated with right-wing white nationalist communities. Although none of these preprints intentionally espouse any right-wing extremist messages, cases exist where extremist appropriation comprises more than 50% of the tweets referencing a given preprint. These results present unique opportunities for improving and contextualizing research evaluation as well as shedding light on the unavoidable challenges of scientific discourse afforded by social media.

scholarly journals The use of Twitter and Facebook Social Media in Communicating & Disseminating Weather and Climate Information by Kenya Meteorological Department

2020 ◽  
pp. 11-21
Author(s):  
Misiani Zachary ◽  
Lun Yin ◽  
Mwai Zacharia ◽  
Xiaohan Zhang ◽  
Yanyan Zheng ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Research Methodology ◽  
Information Dissemination ◽  
The Other ◽  
Significant Part ◽  
Climate Information ◽  
Traditional Media ◽  
Weather And Climate ◽  
Social Media Platforms

Today, traditional media is still a significant part of disseminating weather and climate information, still they have not been able to reach out to all users of the target audience alone. On the other hand, social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, etc. are used as a tool of communicating weather and climate information to various users in a well-organized manner like never before. Using a scientific research methodology of case study, the research was designed to explore how the Kenya Meteorological Department (KMD) is using Twitter and Facebook accounts for weather and climate information dissemination to various users.

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