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Background The increasing volume of health-related social media activity, where users connect, collaborate, and engage, has increased the significance of analyzing how people use health-related social media. Objective The aim of this study was to classify the content (eg, posts that share experiences and seek support) of users who write health-related social media posts and study the effect of user demographics on post content. Methods We analyzed two different types of health-related social media: (1) health-related online forums—WebMD and DailyStrength—and (2) general online social networks—Twitter and Google+. We identified several categories of post content and built classifiers to automatically detect these categories. These classifiers were used to study the distribution of categories for various demographic groups. Results We achieved an accuracy of at least 84% and a balanced accuracy of at least 0.81 for half of the post content categories in our experiments. In addition, 70.04% (4741/6769) of posts by male WebMD users asked for advice, and male users’ WebMD posts were more likely to ask for medical advice than female users’ posts. The majority of posts on DailyStrength shared experiences, regardless of the gender, age group, or location of their authors. Furthermore, health-related posts on Twitter and Google+ were used to share experiences less frequently than posts on WebMD and DailyStrength. Conclusions We studied and analyzed the content of health-related social media posts. Our results can guide health advocates and researchers to better target patient populations based on the application type. Given a research question or an outreach goal, our results can be used to choose the best online forums to answer the question or disseminate a message.
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Spotlight Tweets: A Lens for Exploring Attention Dynamics within Online Sensemaking During Crisis Events
In this article, we introduce the concept of a spotlight social media post —a post that receives an unexpected burst of attention—and explore how such posts reveal salient aspects of online collective sensemaking and attention dynamics during a crisis event. Specifically, we examine the online conversation surrounding a false missile alert in Hawaii in January 2018. Through a mixed-methods analysis and visualizations, our research uncovers mechanisms that lead to rapid attention gains, such as spotlighting —when a user with existing influence confers attention by sharing others’ content with their audience. We highlight how spotlight social media posts (specifically spotlight tweets ) are distinct from other heavily shared content and that they offer insight into previously overlooked patterns in information exchange. We additionally reveal that attention dynamics may alter the social position of spotlight post authors immediately afterward (and possibly in the long term). We argue that spotlight social media posts offer a productive window for understanding online collective sensemaking, and we discuss how this can inform social media platform design and serve as a basis of future research.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1749815
- PAR ID:
- 10428072
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ACM Transactions on Social Computing
- Volume:
- 6
- Issue:
- 1-2
- ISSN:
- 2469-7818
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 33
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3577213
