From Information to Affirmation: An Investigation on the Echo Chamber Effect from YouTube Comments under Technology Product Reviews

Social media may create echo chambers that reaffirm users' beliefs and opinions through repeated exposure of similar notions. Whilst the formation and effect of echo chambers have been intensively examined in thread-based platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Reddit, we shift our focus on product review discussions on YouTube. This paper examines YouTube comments (n=2500) through a combined approach of quantitative content analysis (QCA) and sentiment analysis (SA) under selected selected YouTube videos (n=10). We conclude this paper by highlighting the formation of echo chamber effect in relation to comment argumentation and sentiments.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figures and 3 table

Going Viral: A Qualitative Analysis of the Anti-Vaccine Movement & Social Media

In the recent years of the rise of Web 2.0, health information has become more accessible. With this shift has come a reliance on social media to inform and educate the masses on vaccines. With the introduction of the Covid-19 vaccine, the conversation surrounding vaccines moved to the forefront of the United States’ zeitgeist from late 2021 to early 2022. In this research, I conducted a case study on the communication surrounding vaccines on social media while examining specific Facebook groups that advance the misinformation surrounding vaccines. I examined over 300 posts from four public Facebook groups in order to determine how the Covid-19 vaccines and vaccines in general were being discussed. Through qualitative content analysis, multiple strategies were revealed that illuminated how the masses on Facebook utilize social media to participate in anti-vaccination culture

Social media mining under the COVID-19 context: Progress, challenges, and opportunities

Social media platforms allow users worldwide to create and share information, forging vast sensing networks that allow information on certain topics to be collected, stored, mined, and analyzed in a rapid manner. During the COVID-19 pandemic, extensive social media mining efforts have been undertaken to tackle COVID-19 challenges from various perspectives. This review summarizes the progress of social media data mining studies in the COVID-19 contexts and categorizes them into six major domains, including early warning and detection, human mobility monitoring, communication and information conveying, public attitudes and emotions, infodemic and misinformation, and hatred and violence. We further document essential features of publicly available COVID-19 related social media data archives that will benefit research communities in conducting replicable and repro�ducible studies. In addition, we discuss seven challenges in social media analytics associated with their potential impacts on derived COVID-19 findings, followed by our visions for the possible paths forward in regard to social media-based COVID-19 investigations. This review serves as a valuable reference that recaps social media mining efforts in COVID-19 related studies and provides future directions along which the information harnessed from social media can be used to address public health emergencies

Systematic review:YouTube recommendations and problematic content

There has been much concern that social media, in particular YouTube, may facilitate radicalisation and polarisation of online audiences. This systematic review aimed to determine whether the YouTube recommender system facilitates pathways to problematic content such as extremist or radicalising material. The review conducted a narrative synthesis of the papers in this area. It assessed the eligibility of 1,187 studies and excluded studies using the PRISMA process for systematic reviews, leaving a final sample of 23 studies. Overall, 14 studies implicated the YouTube recommender system in facilitating problematic content pathways, seven produced mixed results, and two did not implicate the recommender system. The review's findings indicate that the YouTube recommender system could lead users to problematic content. However, due to limited access and an incomplete understanding of the YouTube recommender system, the models built by researchers might not reflect the actual mechanisms underlying the YouTube recommender system and pathways to problematic content

Intentions and Behaviors: Testing Spiral of Silence in a Social Media Context

This study tests for a spiral of silence effect on Facebook using vaccination as the controversial topic. Participants were required to have a Facebook account and to log in to their account to participate in the experiment. The three experimental conditions were real Facebook posts containing a meme about vaccines and a comment thread, where the manipulation occurred. The anti-vaccination condition had mostly anti-vaccination comments (9 of 10); the pro-vaccination condition had mostly pro-vaccination comments (9 of 10); and the mixed condition had an equal number of pro- and anti-vaccination comments (4 pro and 4 anti). Participants could leave a comment on the Facebook post; commenting on the post and intentions to engage with the post were the two dependent variables. Results found no difference in commenting or in intentions among the experimental conditions. Vaccination attitudes did not predict commenting but did predict intentions. There were no interaction effects of condition and attitudes on either commenting or intentions. A total of six comments were made across all conditions. Most of the comments supported vaccines. Results indicate vaccination did not inspire strong enough attitudes to create a spiral of silence effect on Facebook in this experiment

Methods for Social Media Monitoring Related to Vaccination: Systematic Scoping Review (Preprint)

BACKGROUND Social media has changed the communication landscape, exposing individuals to an ever-growing amount of information while also allowing them to create and share content. Although vaccine skepticism is not new, social media has amplified public concerns and facilitated their spread globally. Multiple studies have been conducted to monitor vaccination discussions on social media. However, there is currently insufficient evidence on the best methods to perform social media monitoring. OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to identify the methods most commonly used for monitoring vaccination-related topics on different social media platforms, along with their effectiveness and limitations. METHODS A systematic scoping review was conducted by applying a comprehensive search strategy to multiple databases in December 2018. The articles’ titles, abstracts, and full texts were screened by two reviewers using inclusion and exclusion criteria. After data extraction, a descriptive analysis was performed to summarize the methods used to monitor and analyze social media, including data extraction tools; ethical considerations; search strategies; periods monitored; geolocalization of content; and sentiments, content, and reach analyses. RESULTS This review identified 86 articles on social media monitoring of vaccination, most of which were published after 2015. Although 35 out of the 86 studies used manual browser search tools to collect data from social media, this was time-consuming and only allowed for the analysis of small samples compared to social media application program interfaces or automated monitoring tools. Although simple search strategies were considered less precise, only 10 out of the 86 studies used comprehensive lists of keywords (eg, with hashtags or words related to specific events or concerns). Partly due to privacy settings, geolocalization of data was extremely difficult to obtain, limiting the possibility of performing country-specific analyses. Finally, 20 out of the 86 studies performed trend or content analyses, whereas most of the studies (70%, 60/86) analyzed sentiments toward vaccination. Automated sentiment analyses, performed using leverage, supervised machine learning, or automated software, were fast and provided strong and accurate results. Most studies focused on negative (n=33) and positive (n=31) sentiments toward vaccination, and may have failed to capture the nuances and complexity of emotions around vaccination. Finally, 49 out of the 86 studies determined the reach of social media posts by looking at numbers of followers and engagement (eg, retweets, shares, likes). CONCLUSIONS Social media monitoring still constitutes a new means to research and understand public sentiments around vaccination. A wide range of methods are currently used by researchers. Future research should focus on evaluating these methods to offer more evidence and support the development of social media monitoring as a valuable research design. </sec

Methods for Social Media Monitoring Related to Vaccination: Systematic Scoping Review

This study aims to identify the methods most commonly used for monitoring different social media platforms around vaccination, their effectiveness and limitations. A systematic scoping review was conducted by applying a comprehensive search strategy to multiple databases in December 2018. The articles’ titles, abstracts and full texts were screened by two reviewers using inclusion and exclusion criteria. After data extraction, a descriptive analysis was performed to summarize the methods used to monitor and analyze social media, including data extraction tools, ethical considerations, search strategies, periods monitored, geo-localization of content, and sentiments, content and reach analyzes

Systematic Literature Review on the Spread of Health-related Misinformation on Social Media.

Contemporary commentators describe the current period as "an era of fake news" in which misinformation, generated intentionally or unintentionally, spreads rapidly. Although affecting all areas of life, it poses particular problems in the health arena, where it can delay or prevent effective care, in some cases threatening the lives of individuals. While examples of the rapid spread of misinformation date back to the earliest days of scientific medicine, the internet, by allowing instantaneous communication and powerful amplification has brought about a quantum change. In democracies where ideas compete in the marketplace for attention, accurate scientific information, which may be difficult to comprehend and even dull, is easily crowded out by sensationalized news. In order to uncover the current evidence and better understand the mechanism of misinformation spread, we report a systematic review of the nature and potential drivers of health-related misinformation. We searched PubMed, Cochrane, Web of Science, Scopus and Google databases to identify relevant methodological and empirical articles published between 2012 and 2018. A total of 57 articles were included for full-text analysis. Overall, we observe an increasing trend in published articles on health-related misinformation and the role of social media in its propagation. The most extensively studied topics involving misinformation relate to vaccination, Ebola and Zika Virus, although others, such as nutrition, cancer, fluoridation of water and smoking also featured. Studies adopted theoretical frameworks from psychology and network science, while co-citation analysis revealed potential for greater collaboration across fields. Most studies employed content analysis, social network analysis or experiments, drawing on disparate disciplinary paradigms. Future research should examine susceptibility of different sociodemographic groups to misinformation and understand the role of belief systems on the intention to spread misinformation. Further interdisciplinary research is also warranted to identify effective and tailored interventions to counter the spread of health-related misinformation online

YouTube as a source of information about unproven drugs for Covid-19: the role of the mainstream media and recommendation algorithms in promoting misinformation

In this study, we address how YouTube videos promote misinformation about hydroxychloroquine in Brazil. We follow two research questions. RQ1: How is pro-hydroxychloroquine content propagated on YouTube? RQ2: How does YouTube’s recommendation system suggest videos about hydroxychloroquine on the platform? We use mixed methods (content analysis and social network analysis) to analyze 751 YouTube videos. We found that most pro-HCQ videos in our dataset are posted by mainstream media channels (RQ1) and that YouTube was more likely to recommend pro-HCQ videos than anti-HCQ videos (RQ2). Consequently, the Brazilian mainstream media and YouTube’s algorithms fueled the spread of pro-HCQ content