Tweet content

Large-scale mental health assessments increasingly rely upon user-contributed social media data. It is widely known that mental health and well-being are affected by minority group membership and social disparity. But do these factors manifest in the language use of social media users? We elucidate this question using spatial lag regressions. We examined the county-level ( N  = 1069) associations of lexical indicators linked to well-being and mental health, notably depression (e.g., first-person singular pronouns, negative emotions) with markers of social disparity (e...

BACKGROUND: Health agencies have been widely adopting social media to disseminate important information, educate the public on emerging health issues, and understand public opinions. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) widely used social media platforms during the COVID-19 pandemic to communicate with the public and mitigate the disease in the United States. It is crucial to understand the relationships between the CDC's social media communications and the actual epidemic metrics to improve public health agencies' communication strategies during health emergencies...

Public concern regarding health systems has experienced a rapid surge during the last two years due to the COVID-19 outbreak. Accordingly, medical professionals and health-related institutions reach out to patients and seek feedback to analyze, monitor, and uplift medical services. Such views and perceptions are often shared on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc . Twitter is the most popular and commonly used by the researcher as an online platform for instant access to real-time news, opinions, and discussion...

BACKGROUND: Virtual reality (VR) use in brain injury rehabilitation is emerging. Recommendations for VR development in this field encourage end user engagement to determine the benefits and challenges of VR use; however, existing literature on this topic is limited. Data from social networking sites such as Twitter may further inform development and clinical practice related to the use of VR in brain injury rehabilitation. OBJECTIVE: This study collected and analyzed VR-related tweets to (1) explore the VR tweeting community to determine topics of conversation and network connections, (2) understand user opinions and experiences of VR, and (3) identify tweets related to VR use in health care and brain injury rehabilitation...

BACKGROUND: Sexual violence is prevalent on college campuses, yet formal disclosure and open dialogue are often muffled. Social media has become a powerful platform for survivors and presents an opportunity for researchers to explore social discourse surrounding sexual violence on campuses. Healthcare providers must be knowledgeable of campus climate surrounding sexual violence to provide patient-centered, trauma-informed care and mitigate the detrimental, long-term effects experienced by survivors...

The rapidly increasing prevalence of obesity in South Africa, intertwined with extensive changes in diet, life expectancy, and nutritional status has led to a complex framing of obesity on social media. This has prompted the prioritization of media-based social and behavior change communication interventions leveraging social media for obesity prevention. This study was conducted to understand how obesity is constructed and represented on social media in South Africa. A media review of Facebook and Twitter platforms in South Africa was conducted over a six-month period using Meltwater software for data collection...

BACKGROUND: The COVID-19 outbreak province prompted global behavioral restrictions, impacting public mental health. Sentiment analysis, a tool assessing individual and public emotions from text data, gained importance amid the pandemic. This study focuses on Japan's early public health interventions during COVID-19, utilizing sentiment analysis in infodemiology to gauge public sentiment on social media regarding these interventions. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to investigate shifts in public emotions and sentiments before and after the first state of emergency declaration in Japan...

INTRODUCTION: Social media may facilitate knowledge sharing within health professions education (HPE), but whether and how it is used as a mechanism of knowledge translation (KT) is not understood. This exploratory study aimed to ascertain what content has been shared on Twitter using #MedEd and how it is used as a mechanism of KT. METHODS: Symplur was used to identify all tweets tagged with #MedEd between March 2021 - March 2022. A directed content analysis and multiple cycles of coding were employed...

BACKGROUND: Evaluation of patient engagement practices are frequently researcher-driven, researcher-funded, and asymmetric in power dynamics. Little to no literature on patient experiences in patient engagement exist that is are not framed by institutionally-driven research inquiries (i.e., from the lens of a research team lead, or healthcare administrative setting). Understanding these perspectives can help us understand: (i)what matters to patients when they are engaged in research; (ii)why it matters to them, and(iii) how to improve patient engagement practices, so that the needs and priorities of patients are consistently met...

BACKGROUND: Environmental fungi are threats to personal and public health. Fungal in vitro diagnostics help diagnose invasive fungal infections (IFIs), but clinicians remain underinformed about their use and interpretation. Given the increasing use of social media to share infectious diseases-related content, we designed and implemented a multisite Twitter-based curriculum focused on IFIs and related diagnostics. METHODS: Questions were posted through a dedicated Twitter account twice weekly over 8 weeks...

Social media platforms have become inundated with offensive language. This issue must be addressed for the growth of online social networks (OSNs) and a healthy online environment. While significant research has been devoted to identifying toxic content in major languages like English, this remains an open area of research in the low-resource Pashto language. This study aims to develop an AI model for the automatic detection of offensive textual content in Pashto. To achieve this goal, we have developed a benchmark dataset called the Pashto Offensive Language Dataset (POLD), which comprises tweets collected from Twitter and manually classified into two categories: "offensive" and "not offensive"...

Background: In September 2021, a Finnish political party, the Greens, voted to include cannabis policy reform in their party programme, which would legalise the use, possession, manufacture and sale of cannabis. A rapid public discussion has emerged on different social media platforms, including Twitter. Methods: We downloaded 10 days of Twitter data and prepared it for further text analysis, including sentiment, topic modelling and thematic content analysis. Results: Before the proposal, the average daily number of tweets was approximately 140...

INTRODUCTION: On October 12, 2021, the FDA issued its first marketing granted orders for Vuse, the e-cigarette product by R.J. Reynolds Vapor Company. The public perceptions and reactions to the FDA's Vuse authorization are prevalent on social media platforms such as Twitter/X. We aim to understand public perceptions of the FDA's Vuse authorization in the US using Twitter/X data. METHODS: Through the Twitter/X streaming API (Application Programming Interface), 3,852 tweets between October 12, 2021, and October 23, 2021, were downloaded using the keyword of Vuse...

BACKGROUND: During the coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, segments of the public relied on social media platforms such as Twitter for medical information shared by medical personnel. Although physicians are likely to disseminate more accurate information on Twitter than non-medical individuals, it cannot be taken for granted. As such, tweets written by physicians in Japan should also be scrutinized for accuracy. PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to create a profile of the most popular physician influencers on Twitter in Japan, and to do a fact-check of their tweets regarding COVID-19-related drugs...

On 12 November 2021, after a stagnation of 8.5 years, Japan decided to resume proactive recommendations for HPV vaccines. However, it is not known how the public reacted to the resumption of proactive recommendations for HPV vaccines, which are key elements in health communication that promote HPV vaccination. This study aimed to capture discussions on HPV vaccination on Twitter and to identify user characteristics, sentiments, discussed themes and their potential reach before and after 12 November 2021, when the Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare's decision to resume proactive recommendation for HPV vaccines was first reported by the media in Japan...

OBJECTIVE: We test the effects of three aids on individuals' ability to detect social bots among Twitter personas: a bot indicator score, a training video, and a warning. BACKGROUND: Detecting social bots can prevent online deception. We use a simulated social media task to evaluate three aids. METHOD: Lay participants judged whether each of 60 Twitter personas was a human or social bot in a simulated online environment, using agreement between three machine learning algorithms to estimate the probability of each persona being a bot...

BACKGROUND: Paracetamol, codeine, and tramadol are commonly used to manage mild pain, and their availability without prescription or medical consultation raises concerns about potential opioid addiction. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to explore the perceptions and experiences of Twitter users concerning these drugs. METHODS: We analyzed the tweets in English or Spanish mentioning paracetamol, tramadol, or codeine posted between January 2019 and December 2020...

BACKGROUND: There has been a growth surge in the use of social media among individuals today. The widespread adoption of these platforms, coupled with their engaging features, presents a unique opportunity for the dissemination of health advocacy information. Social media is known as a powerful tool used to share health policy and advocacy efforts and disseminate health information to digital community members and networks. Yet, there is still a gap in the full exploitation of this powerful instrument, among health care professionals, for health advocacy campaigns...

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the novel coronavirus had an impact not only on public health but also on the mental health of the population. Public sentiment on mental health and depression is often captured only in small, survey-based studies, while work based on Twitter data often only looks at the period during the pandemic and does not make comparisons with the pre-pandemic situation. We collected tweets that included the hashtags #MentalHealth and #Depression from before and during the pandemic (8.5 months each)...

This study aims to generate evidence-based guidelines for researchers regarding how to effectively disseminate mental health research via Twitter. Three hundred mental health research Tweets posted from September 2018 to September 2019 were sampled from two large Australian organizations. Twenty-seven predictor variables were coded for each Tweet across five thematic categories: messaging; research area; mental health area; external networks; and media features. Regression analyses were conducted to determine associations with engagement outcomes of Favourites, Retweets, and Comments...