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Social media use is an integral part of people's daily routine nowadays. Obviously, individuals with visual impairment are not excluded and use social media as well, even though they still face accessibility issues. The purpose of this review was to provide an overview of the existing literature on social media used by individuals with visual impairment and of the ways social media have been conceptualized throughout it. A literature search took place in the databases EBSCOhost, ERIC, Scopus and ResearchGate as well as the search engine Google Scholar. A total of 13 studies, published from 2011 to 2022 met our criteria and were included in this scoping review. According to our results, Facebook is the most used social media website by individuals with visual impairment as it was referenced in almost every single one of the studies reviewed and was recognized as the most used by individuals with visual impairment in the majority of them. Twitter is the second most popular social media website among individuals with visual impairment, followed by YouTube, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Skype. Consequently, the statement that Facebook is the most popular social media website based on the number of its users is also confirmed with regard to users with visual impairment. However, the fact that an instant messaging service, such as WhatsApp, is recognized among researchers as a social medium when various social media definitions in the existing literature exclude this type of services showcases the confusion prevailing among researchers in this field. Thus, the literature would greatly benefit if researchers proposed a more thorough and robust definition for the widely, often inaccurately, used term social media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our social identities determine how we interact and engage with the world surrounding us. In online settings, individuals can make these identities explicit by including them in their public biography, possibly signaling a change in what is important to them and how they should be viewed. While there is evidence suggesting the impact of intentional identity disclosure in online social platforms, its actual effect on engagement activities at the user level has yet to be explored. Here, we perform the first large-scale study on Twitter that examines behavioral changes following identity disclosure on Twitter profiles. Combining social networks with methods from natural language processing and quasi-experimental analyses, we discover that after disclosing an identity on their profiles, users (1) tweet and retweet more in a way that aligns with their respective identities, and (2) connect more with users that disclose similar identities. We also examine whether disclosing the identity increases the chance of being targeted for offensive comments and find that in fact (3) the combined effect of disclosing identity via both tweets and profiles is associated with a reduced number of offensive replies from others. Our findings highlight that the decision to disclose one's identity in online spaces can lead to substantial changes in how they express themselves or forge connections, with a lesser degree of negative consequences than anticipated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociolinguistic research has demonstrated that 'urban contact dialects' tend to diffuse beyond the speech communities in which they first emerge. However, no research has attempted to explore the distribution of these varieties across an entire nation nor isolate the social mechanisms that propel their spread. In this paper, we use a corpus of 1.8 billion geo‐tagged tweets to explore the spread of Multicultural London English (MLE) lexis across the United Kingdom. We find evidence for the diffusion of MLE lexis from East and North London into other ethnically and culturally diverse urban centres across England, particularly those in the South (e.g. Luton), but find lower frequencies of MLE lexis in the North of England (e.g. Manchester), and in Scotland and Wales. Concluding, we emphasise the role of demographic similarity in the diffusion of linguistic innovations by demonstrating that this variety originated in London and diffused into other urban areas in England through the social networks of Black and Asian users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we explore two parallel networks of discourse during the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiations of 2019 in Madrid (25th Conference of the Parties, COP25): one produced by news media coverage of the talks; the other by Twitter users who shared news content about the talks. Findings show that transnational public spheres can emerge out of relatively homogeneous moments internal to networks and external to networks (i.e. across multiple networks) at the intersection of certain actors and topics, cultural practices, and commercial and non-commercial (state) institutions. Yet there are persistent divisions along language, geographic, and other lines that encourage the formation of distinct micro-spheres of networked actors (internal heterogeneity), as well as distinct media practices that work to differentiate mass media networks from networks produced by a different set of publics on social media (external heterogeneity). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recognition of the presence and relevance of information on climate change in the media is a key issue in the face of new global goals and challenges, such as the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. We are witnessing a configuration of public opinion through social networks, especially Twitter, so its analysis can be enlightening to address the challenges of citizen information, building an interactive space for public opinion. The objective of this work is to review the presence of messages on climate change on Twitter in Spain and to analyze the content published in 2022, considering the sender, the message, the approaches and the treatment, comparing it with similar analyzes carried out in the three previous years (2019, 2020, 2021), incorporating a longitudinal perspective. Using a quantitative methodology, this study applies a content analysis protocol, with 35 variables, executed by human coders, on a final sample of 753 tweets, published between the months of March and June 2022. The conclusions provide guidance on who the most active voices, the main issues, the visibility of young people and the most commented effects, while the consequences of the armed conflict in relation to the ecological transition are appreciated, such as the return and economic dependence on fossil fuels, the effect of international sanctions on energy, rethinking of supply policies, reduction of food and greenhouse gas emissions in Europe. New variables are also considered to be included in future studies, such as the ethical perspective of information and hate speech and denial towards climate change present in this network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of cobranding and brand extension strategies to access new markets has been a topic of significant interest. However, surprisingly few studies have examined cross-category connections of brands using publicly available digital footprints. In this study, the authors introduce a new, scalable automated approach for identifying potential cobranding and brand extension opportunities using brand networks derived from publicly available Twitter followership data. The digital user–brand relationship, established through followership activity, is regarded as an expression of interest toward the brand. Common followership patterns between brands are then extracted to capture cointerest between those brands' audience. By utilizing the cointerest patterns, the approach aims to derive cross-category brand–brand and brand–category connections, which can serve as important measures for assessing cobranding and extensions opportunities. This article introduces a new construct, transcendence, which measures the extent to which a brand's followers overlap with those of other brands in a new category. The analysis is conducted at different points in time to help managers track shifts in brand transcendence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cultural institutions must use social networks to promote the empowerment of audiences and democratize knowledge through communication by emphasizing participatory and high-quality heritage education. This study aimed to create an analysis instrument (EduComR) that allows to identify and examine the educational-communicative strategies carried out by heritage institutions on social networks. The research followed a mixed methodology, where the predominant approach was qualitative, involving a content analysis of the publications shared in social media. The pilot test sample consisted of studying n=364,448 tweets from 72 institutional accounts in both American and European contexts published in Spanish, English, Portuguese and Italian. The results yielded a validated by expert judgement instrument composed of five dimensions of analysis: 1) Hypertext elements used by cultural institutions to share content, 2) Functions of language, 3) Procedures of heritage education, 4) The participatory dimension through the R-relational factor and 5) Suggested learning. The EduComR instrument represents a relevant contribution to the evaluative research of educational-communicative actions in the field of heritage and allows cultural institutions to identify key media actions to improve their planning, encourage engagement and promote hyper-connected audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the effect of social learning on new turfgrass variety adoption decisions using data from 231 turfgrass professionals' Twitter accounts between 1 Jun 2018 and 31 Dec 2019. To determine the social learning effect, we decompose networking effects into social learning, individual-level and group-level similarities, herd behavior, and clustering effects. Our study estimates a spatial autoregressive probit model that directly incorporates the social network structure to account for unobservable networking effects and potential reflection problem. A Bayesian estimation procedure is used to alleviate the convergence problem caused by the complexity of model specification. Empirical results show that the social learning effect positively influences the new technology adoption and was greater than herd behavior effect. The results also suggest that turf professionals rely more on suggestions and information from online social networking among themselves than recommendations from advisors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional news outlets, such as newspapers and television, are no longer major sources of news. These media channels have been replaced by social platforms, which have increased in value as information distributors. This change in communication is an underlying reason for the election fraud controversies that occurred in the United States and South Korea, which hold high standards of democracy, during similar periods. This study investigates a model for sharing political disputes over social networks, especially Twitter, and illustrates the influence of political polarization. This study examines Twitter content around the presidential elections in the United States and South Korea in 2020 and 2022, respectively. It applies semantic network analysis and structural topic modeling to describe and compare the dynamics of online discourse on the issue of election fraud. The results show that online spaces such as Twitter serve as public spheres for discussion among active political participants. Social networks are key settings for forming and spreading election fraud controversies in the United States and South Korea, with differences in content. In addition, the study applies large-volume text data and new analytical methods such as the structural topic model to examine the in-depth relationships among political issues in cyberspace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: A new artificial intelligence (AI) methodology is analyzed, with the understanding that communication is one of the most important fields of work for its application. In addition to the content collection and production phases, other areas within the world of communication such as distribution, and specifically the moderation of comments (on social networks and in the media) are also experiencing a period of innovation, but in a less obvious way for the audience. Methodology: We proceeded to find out how various AI tools can measure the quality of the conversation and combat toxicity in communicative spaces. We analyzed 43,165 tweets published from 18 to 24 October 2021 corresponding to seven Spanish politicians and the cascade of user responses. Results: The main consequences point to insults as the predominant toxic category in the comments, regardless of ideology. In addition, the conversations have an average of 21% of bots. Discussion: Given the above, this research shows how new AI methodologies can account for a hitherto qualitative term such as toxicity and contradicts previous findings on bots as spreaders of toxicity, with real users generating the most toxicity. Conclusions: In the specific study of politics, there is a perceived difference in behaviors between horizontal conversation between peers and vertical conversation with politicians. Therefore, these tools help to make visible new realities such as toxicity, with the ultimate aim of eradicating it and cleaning up the online debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Public media are essential to offer a service of general interest to the population to have equitable access to information, culture, democratic participation and equal opportunities. However, they continue to transmit biases and gender stereotypes that can have a great social scope, also in its digital editions, where a large part of the imbalances presents in traditional media have been transferred and adapted. Methodology: This paper analyzes the representation of gender on the Twitter profile of the regional channel Canal Sur Noticias. For this, a content analysis of a total of N=754 tweets published in September and October 2022 is carried out to find out if there is an underrepresentation of women in news coverage and if gender biases and stereotypes are perceived in the sections, spheres of action, authorship, external sources and in the audiovisual content. Results: The findings reveal that women are clearly underrepresented in this social network, not only as protagonist, also as authors and external sources, and a relegation to the background, in sections and areas of lesser weight, in addition biases persist and stereotypes such as gender markings, traditional roles, or sexist language in text and images. Discussion and Conclusions: This paper show an imbalance in the representation of gender in the Twitter of the public channel, which adapts the same biases present in its traditional format, hindering the social advancement of women in the digital space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of All Azimuth: A Journal of Foreign Policy & Peace is the property of Ihsan Dogramaci Peace Foundation, Center for Foreign Policy & Peace Research and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista General de Información y Documentación is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The world of Marketing has undergone unimaginable changes in the last century. The level of trans formationmar ketingpractices, tools andtechniqueshaveundergone, isbeyondone's wildestimagination. A market, in a traditional economy, was only confined to a physical place with many limitations of place, time and utility. The era of globalization has ensured that the world market is shrunk to the size of human palm as all the markets are accessible with the touch of our fingertips. Evidently, social media which started off asa platform for humaninteraction, nowhasbeendevelopedintoaplatform tha tcan effectively beused for brand positioning, advertisingandmany other saspects of marketing management. For any business, it is imperative to keep up with the advancements taking placein the world of Marketing and marketing tools. This paper is an attempt at presenting one of the mostrelevanttrends in marketing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study delved into the realm of conspiratorial thinking and misinformation on Twitter, examining the case of Silvia Romano, an Italian aid worker who faced online conspiratorial attacks before and after her release. With the increasing prevalence of conspiratorial narratives on social media, this research investigated the interplay between conspiratorial thinking and the dissemination of misinformation. Two datasets comprising Italian tweets were analyzed, aiming to uncover primary topics, detect instances of conspiratorial thinking, explore broader emerging topics beyond Silvia Romano's case, and examine whether authors of conspiratorial narratives also engage in spreading misinformation. Twitter served as a critical platform for this study, reflecting its evolving role in news dissemination and social networking. The research employed topic modeling techniques and coherence scores to achieve these objectives, addressing challenges posed by the inherent ambiguities in defining conspiratorial narratives. The findings contribute to a deeper understanding of the complex dynamics of conspiratorial thinking and misinformation in the digital age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fragmentation of the Spanish party system has led to a growing political polarization, particularly evident on the Internet. The discursive strategies of political actors online, combined with the particularities of communication on social media platforms such as the disinhibition effect, echo chambers, and filter bubbles, are likely to promote a state of tension among digital citizens. This tension is particularly pronounced in gender issues, which have become key positions of political parties, with convergence of sexism in the community and a highly reactive misogynistic online culture that turns female politicians into easy targets. Starting from the hashtag #IreneMonteroDimision, which conveys a paradigmatic criticism movement against the Spanish Minister of Equality, an analysis of the social conversation on Twitter is developed to determine its intentionality, tone, and orientation, as well as the themes and users that generated the most tension. In this way, multimodal content and discourse analysis is applied to the 418 tweets with the greatest interaction and explicitly directed at the minister. The hypothesis is that the criticism of Irene Montero goes beyond the management of her Ministry to place her at the center of a power struggle in which political ideology, hate speech, and antifeminism converge. The study has shown that attacks on Montero extend to the Executive and the feminist movement; they are promoted by a mass of politicized and polarized profiles, with constant activism and a tendency towards contagious replication of messages. These practices, as well as the participation of artificial profiles, allow us to appreciate signs of astroturfing; behind this seemingly natural critical reaction, there are orchestrated movements of antifeminist and far-right profiles (gender trolling), but also of trans-exclusionary feminists opposed to legislation promoted by Montero. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding the increasing Dalit activism on social media through the lens of publics and counter-publics, this paper shows how the Bhim Army, a popular on-ground Dalit organisation in North India, makes use of two social media platforms, Twitter and Facebook, to further its organisational agenda, and to recruit, inform and mobilise. Using insights from digital ethnography and interviews with Bhim Army leaders, this paper also builds on the theoretical and methodological understandings of social media usage by marginalised actors and intervenes in the debates regarding the role of social media in social movement mobilisation, as well as the frameworks of organisational activities on Twitter and Facebook. Finally, it shows how the different techno-architectural make-up of the two platforms produces different kinds of mobilisations and functions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Millions of individuals use Twitter, one of the most prominent social media sites, to exchange information, broadcast tweets, and follow other users. Twitter being an open application programming interface is vulnerable to attacks from fake accounts. Fake accounts are primarily used for advertising and marketing, defamation of an individual, consumer data acquisition, increasing fake blog or website traffic, sharing wrong information, online fraud, and control. Fake accounts are disruptive to both users and service providers, thus it's critical to recognize and filter out such information on social media. This paper presents a technique for detecting fake Twitter accounts using the feature set mapped to Twitter's rules and policies to flag suspicious accounts. To choose the apt subset of features from the original feature space, feature selection techniques such as information gain and correlation were used. Users have been classified using a Logistic Regression classifier with the detection accuracy of 93.5 percent after being trained on the data of about 1,00,000 Twitter users. Furthermore, an algorithm for classifying suspicious users as Fake profiles has been presented. The results of the experiments show that the suggested model outperforms competitive state-of-the-art research in the majority of circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media is frequently plagued with undesirable phenomena such as cyberbullying and abusive content in the form of hateful and racist posts. Therefore, it is crucial to study and propose better mechanisms to automatically identify communication that promote hate speech, hostility, and aggressiveness. Traditional approaches have only focused on exploiting the content and writing style of social media posts while ignoring information related to their context. On the other hand, several recent works have reported some interesting findings in this direction, although they have lacked an exhaustive analysis of contextual information, and also an evaluation about if this same premise holds to detect different types of abusive comments, e.g. offensive, hostile and hateful. For this, we have extended seven Twitter benchmark datasets related to the detection of offensive, aggressive, hostile, and hateful communication. We evaluate our hypothesis by using three different learning models, considering classical (Bag of Words), advanced (Glove), and state-of-the-art (BERT) text representations. Experiments show statistically significant differences between the classification scores of all methods that use a combination of text and metadata in comparison to the classical view of only using the text content of the messages, thus suggesting the importance of paying attention to context to spot the different kinds of abusive comments on social networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prosumption capital is underexplored within social media sites, especially within sports. This article explores how the Covid-19 disruptions were used to extract prosumption capital from Twitter. Adopting an economic sociology perspective to measure prosumption capital, 2.3 million tweets were analyzed across the National Basketball Association, Major League Baseball, National Hockey League, and Major League Soccer sports properties. This article applies social network analysis measures, indegree, domain, and proximity prestige to measure prosumption capital and shows how media organizations and other public figures capitalized on the Covid-19 disruptions. It also shows how the structure and those capitalizing through prosumption on Twitter are similar across the sports properties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the social media activities of gambling providers in Germany, focusing on the platform Twitter. A collection of 34.151 tweets from 13 Twitter accounts was made, representing casinos, sports betting, state lotteries, social lotteries and lottery brokers. We apply an explorative mixed-methods approach, integrating a summative content analysis together with a semi-supervised guided topic modeling approach, to analyse frequency, number of followers, interaction and content of Twitter messages, and work out differences among the individual providers. The results show that Twitter does not seem to be particularly important for gambling providers who are active in Germany. Regarding outreach, frequency of tweets and interaction, Twitter plays a much smaller role than, for example, in the UK. The potential for Twitter to be an advertising, marketing and interaction channel has not yet been fully exploited, which would make it a perfect moment for developing an appropriate regulatory framework. Overall, the results of semi-supervised topic modeling show that providers most often use informative content (news) and combine it with other, usually less neutral content. It is alarming that many providers make little or no use of Responsible Gambling messages. Even though the activities are presently on a low level, they contribute to the normalization of gambling, setting incentives for increasing gambling participation. Children and youth form a large segment of Twitter users. Potential harm can arise especially for this group because of the lack of enforcement of any age limit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nationalist and nativist movements throughout the world have capitalized on the wide impact of social media, especially Twitter. In the case of the United States, first as candidate and then as president, Donald Trump actively used Twitter to disseminate his views on immigration and migrants. This paper analyzes the themes and political implications of his tweets from Trump's electoral win to the end of the second year of his presidency. The authors' assumptions are that Trump's rhetoric unleashed a collective sentiment against migrants and its supporters. The findings show that some topics were retweeted massively, fueling perceptions that most Americans were against immigrant communities and their protectors. We conducted content analysis of the tweets sent by Mr. Trump as president during the first half of his presidency. We used Trump's personal Twitter account, @realDonaldTrump, for this analysis. Once president, Trump continued using his personal account as a policy and political media instrument instead of the existing @POTUS account. Since Trump ran on a nativist platform, we examined his tweets with strong negative sentiments against migrants and immigration in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Union has suffered several problems in recent years, which triggers a proactive action by its institutions to generate a united citizenry and awareness of the importance of the EU. In the field of higher education, the European Strategy for Universities born in 2019 aims to strengthen and developed a common university system. The Erasmus program has traditionally been identified as the main driver of integration, but the emergence of European universities may mark a new phase in the shaping of the European Public Sphere (EPS). In this sense, social media are the key communication tool for higher education centers. The objective of this work is to examine the activity on social media of the 40 consortia of European Universities belonging to the first and second calls. First, the presence on the different social networks of these entities is analyzed to establish a map of the alliances, based on the number of social networks used, the volume of followers, the coordinating university and the year of the call. After identifying Twitter as the most used network, a content analysis is carried out on 12 variables of all the messages published by these consortia since their creation, with the aim of determining whether the content published on their Twitter accounts is professional in tone. The results reveal scant interactivity that does not take advantage of the potential of social networks. However, there is a certain influence of the national cultures in terms of use of digital platforms in the different countries that head each consortium, with Spain and France being rather remarkable in this aspect. Likewise, the advantage acquired by first-generation consortia boosts their greater impact. This leads to a reflection upon the true transnational dimension of the communication implemented by these universities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dissemination and viralization of information on social media has been widely studied from various perspectives, including the digital activism. On the other hand, disability-related activism has conquered the online esphere, thus obtaining a reach that goes beyond the offline space and dialogue. This article analyzes the conversation generated on Twitter taking as a sample all the tweets with the hashtag #disability before and after the International Day of Diabled Persons. More than 18,000 tweets have been analyzed in which there are almost as many mentions, which have been interpreted as the weighted edges of a directed graph with the Gephi software, using the Force Atlas 2 brute force algorithm. The focus has been placed on the conversational communities generated around that hashtag, the main themes and the prominent actors in said conversational communities. In conclusion, it is verified that, although the network of mentions is very dispersed, Twitter is the scene of claims that include certain institutional and political support from the Latin American environment, from entities related to the cause such as Fundación ONCE and, above all, the clear predominance of female activists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Mediterranean Journal of Communication / Revista Mediterránea de Comunicación is the property of Revista Mediterranea de Comunicacion / Mediterranean Journal of Communication and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Studies on suicide and the Internet emerged only a decade ago, and those on suicidal behaviors and social media are even more recent. Until today, all the benefits and harms related to the use of social networks and suicidal behaviors in adolescence are not fully known. However, the prevailing presence of social networks in youth life is promoting the development of strategies based on their use, for the intervention, detection, and prevention of suicide. The online presentation of suicidal behaviors is a sign of the importance of this phenomenon and the need to take care of it, considering that in the scientific literature there is little analysis of the relationship between suicidality and social networks. Therefore, it is necessary to explore all the possibilities offered by social networks to detect the factors involved in suicidal behavior. This work consists of an exploratory analysis of social discourse on Twitter based on three categories associated with suicidal behavior, for descriptive, preventive, and comparative purposes, between two samples of adolescents: Italian and Spanish. The extracted results show a greater number of both prosuicide and instigator tweets in the Italian sample, compared to the Spanish one, while the Spanish sample exceeds the Italian one in terms of anti-suicide tweets. It is suggested to keep on researching the useful responses to online communications from adolescents and into other possibilities offered by social media platforms in the analysis of youth suicide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media platforms have revolutionized information exchange and socialization in today's world. Twitter, as one of the prominent platforms, enables users to connect with others and express their opinions. This study focuses on analyzing user engagement levels on Twitter using graph mining and clustering techniques. We measure user engagement based on various tweet attributes, including retweets, replies, and more. Specifically, we explore the strength of user connections in Twitter networks by examining the diversity of edges. Our approach incorporates graph mining models that assign different weights to evaluate the significance of each connection. Additionally, clustering techniques are employed to group users based on their engagement patterns and behaviors. Statistical analysis was conducted to assess the similarity between user profiles, as well as attributes, such as friendship, followings, and interactions within the Twitter social network. The findings highlight the discovery of closely linked user groups and the identification of distinct clusters based on engagement levels. This research emphasizes the importance of understanding both individual and group behaviors in comprehending user engagement dynamics on Twitter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fundamental role of political discussions in democracy has been frequently highlighted by quantitative and qualitative literature at the intersection of political communication and media effects. Most research has revolved around whether, and if so under what conditions, social media platforms constitute public spaces where democracy can be nurtured and promoted. Building on this literature and underscoring the importance of individuals' self-effects theories, this qualitative study, based on 42 in-depth interviews, clarifies how social media users navigate political discussions and their ulterior affective and cognitive processes, introducing the notion of political discussion regret. Specifically, this concept fundamentally emphasizes the sterility of partaking in political discussions as the main motivation for users' cognitive lamentation, which indirectly cancels the presumed muscle of social media as the sphere of public and private political discussion and deliberations. Implications of the study's findings and main theoretical consequences for the political discussion literature are also provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the under-researched topic of the use of Twitter by members of parliament (MPs) in Latin America. There have not yet been any thorough comparative studies on this topic, and the majority of publications on the region focus on single case studies. Previous studies have primarily concentrated on presidents, or in the case of MPs, on specific case studies. A total of 2,353,138 tweets were accessed via the Twitter API, and 3,215 MPs were examined. Regression models and correlations were used to answer research questions, and the main variables examined concerned individual characteristics of MPs (gender and age) and socioeconomic indicators of the country (number of people on Twitter, internet access, Human Development Index - HDI). As a result, this paper offers a report on how MPs in Latin America are currently utilizing Twitter. While this social network is used by more than 90% of MPs in some countries (Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Peru, and Uruguay), there are countries where fewer than half of MPs use it (Bolivia, Honduras, and Nicaragua). The results show that female MPs are more likely than male MPs to use Twitter. In addition, Twitter is being adopted more by younger MPs. Other results show that country characteristics such as internet penetration, Twitter population, and the HDI are significant predictors regarding the adoption and use of Twitter by MPs. These results are consistent with assumptions based on cost-benefit calculus. Thus, it does not make as much sense for politicians to adopt Twitter in countries where there are fewer people on Twitter and low internet penetration. In particular, if politicians want to be elected or inform citizens about their activities, they have an opportunity to reach voters through Twitter. However, this is only true if Twitter is used in their countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change has become an issue of great relevance in society in recent years, and the data provided by the scientific community recommend acting as soon as possible and forcefully. Scientists, politicians, the media, and thanks to the new media, citizens and other social agents participate in the debate on this issue. Despite the data and general consensus in the scientific community, the climate change debate is highly polarized, with skeptical voices denying or questioning climate change and using social media to amplify the reach of their message. This can encourage misinformation and polarization. This study tries to identify the key indicators of social skepticism around climate change through the analysis of users' social activism and behavioral patterns on Twitter. We analyze keywords, frequency, topics, and categories from a sample of 78,168 tweets. The results show, first, that there is an overlap of topics, with 24 of the 28 topics grouped in the intertopic distance map; second, that the size of the topics is relatively small and linked to specific events; and, third, that there is a significant political presence, especially from the United States. This work therefore contributes to the analysis of communication on Twitter about opinions against climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to characterize the main hashtags of Mexican feminist activism as part of the Latin American connected crowds, on the basis of a review of the most popular trends between 2016 and 2021 on Twitter. A total of 50 hashtags have been selected that, due to their repeated use, are characterized as femitags, that is, performative meta-discursive identifiers that mainly do three things: disseminate and tune in to frames of protest; extend women's voices and slogans; and mobilize synchronic, diachronic, and transnational repertoires of collective action. These femitags appear in situated contexts, usually around events such as new cases of violence against women and calls to take to the streets, but with their extension, they become meta-communicative labels that articulate different activist practices. This study reveals not only their functions, but also their role as articulators of networked mobilizations, demonstrating the profound online and real-life intertwining of the fourth wave of Mexican, Latin American, and Spanish-speaking feminism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper empirically investigates Social Media adoption as a driver of firms' performance. Specifically, we focus on the relationship between the embracing of Twitter and Italian Innovative Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) profitability over 2011–19. Although Twitter is perceived as a low-cost and effective communication channel, the main results show that Innovative SMEs adopting Social Media appear to have lower profitability than those without social network implementation. An interpretation of this evidence can rely on the difficulty of innovative SMEs in overcoming barriers to Twitter adoption related to the human capital required to maintain relationships with the online community of consumers in the Italian context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: The COVID-19 pandemic has increased online interactions and the spread of misinformation. Some researchers anticipate benefits stemming from improved public awareness of the value of vaccines while others worry concerns around vaccine development and public health mandates may have damaged public trust. There is a need to understand whether the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccine development, and vaccine mandates have influenced HPV vaccine attitudes and sentiments to inform health communication strategies. Methods: We collected 596,987 global English-language tweets from January 2019-May 2021 using Twitter's Academic Research Product track. We determined vaccine confident and hesitant networks discussing HPV immunization using social network analysis. Then, we used a neural network approach to natural language processing to measure narratives and sentiment pertaining to HPV immunization. Results: Most of the tweets in the vaccine hesitant network were negative in tone (54.9%) and focused on safety concerns surrounding the HPV vaccine while most of the tweets in the vaccine confident network were neutral (51.6%) and emphasized the health benefits of vaccination. Growth in negative sentiment among the vaccine hesitant network corresponded with legislative efforts in the State of New York to mandate HPV vaccination for public school students in 2019 and the WHO declaration of COVID-19 as a Global Health Emergency in 2020. In the vaccine confident network, the number of tweets concerning the HPV vaccine decreased during the COVID-19 pandemic but in both vaccine hesitant and confident networks, the sentiments, and themes of tweets about HPV vaccine were unchanged. Conclusions: Although we did not observe a difference in narratives or sentiments surrounding the HPV vaccine during the COVID-19 pandemic, we observed a decreased focus on the HPV vaccine among vaccine confident groups. As routine vaccine catch-up programs restart, there is a need to invest in health communication online to raise awareness about the benefits and safety of the HPV vaccine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The launch of Disney+ in Spain in March 2020 coincided with the Covid-19 pandemic and a period of home confinement for many Spaniards. This study examines the advertising and engagement strategy used by Disney+ on Twitter and Instagram, analyzing 2,268 messages. The platform's social media use is similar to that of its competitors, with Twitter used for user engagement and Instagram used for content promotion. However, the study finds that the platform missed the opportunity to emphasize its unique qualities and appeal to the brand's values. Despite this, Disney+ generated significant engagement during its launch month, reflecting high levels of user anticipation. Popular original productions such as The Mandalorian and Aladdin, as well as acquired content like The Simpsons, indicate the brand's focus on a family or broad-spectrum target audience, in contrast to the younger and niche audiences favored by its competitors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the beginning of the reign of Juan Carlos I, the media maintained a complicit stance with the figure of Juan Carlos I. This attitude changed with the consolidation of the digital press and social networks, coinciding with a transformation towards a polarized political context. The article analyzes the messages posted on Twitter during 2021 on the anniversaries of the Second Republic (April 1931), the military insurrection of July 1936 and the coup d'état of February 23, (1981). The results show how the messages of these historical anniversaries were the excuse to raise a polarized debate about the present and future of the monarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Laterally with the birth of the Internet, the fast growth of mobile strategies has democratised content production owing to the widespread usage of social media, resulting in a detonation of short informal writings. Twitter is microblogging short text and social networking services, with posted millions of quick messages. Twitter analysis addresses the topic of interpreting users' tweets in terms of ideas, interests, and views in a range of settings and fields. This type of study can be useful for a variation of academics and applications that need knowing people's perspectives on a given topic or event. Although sentiment examination of these texts is useful for a variety of reasons, it is typically seen as a difficult undertaking due to the fact that these messages are frequently short, informal, loud, and rich in linguistic ambiguities such as polysemy. Furthermore, most contemporary sentiment analysis algorithms are based on clean data. In this paper, we offers a machine-learning-based sentiment analysis method that extracts features from Term Frequency and Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) and needs to apply deep intelligent wordnet lemmatize to improve the excellence of tweets by removing noise. We also utilise the Random Forest network to detect the emotion of a tweet. To authenticate the proposed approach performance, we conduct extensive tests on publically accessible datasets, and the findings reveal that the suggested technique significantly outperforms sentiment classification in multi-class emotion text data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital platforms are spaces for social participation with significant value in the development of the identity of adolescents and emerging adults. The objective is to identify the behavior and visibility of LGBT content using Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter posts of such content from May 16 to November 16, 2022, collecting 539,389 posts. Social media monitoring techniques gathered the posts with the keywords “LGTB” or “LGBT” in Spanish and English, forming the database. The methodology is based on a mixed design: first, the database is analyzed using Big Data techniques and, second, the 10 most viral posts from each social network are selected. The results show that dissemination of gender identity in content and meaning is uneven across the various social networks. Twitter profiles have a higher number of posts (61%), polarization, and lower virality and exhibit visible LGBTphobia. Instagram has a number of posts (37%) and average virality, with positive sentiments. TikTok has fewer posts (2%), less polarization, positive messages, and extreme virality. The three networks consider the Pride demonstrations to be a symbol of the community because they destabilize and confront LGBTphobic oppression by occupying public spaces, opening the closet without stigma or shame, as is reflected on social networks. The behavior of LGBT content on these platforms is multidimensional, uneven, and differentiated, which demonstrates the necessity of ensuring respect for the diversity of sexual orientation and gender identity on digital platforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Institutional communication is becoming a strategic instrument for universities, since it facilitates the relationships with their various publics and allows positioning of the institutional brand, which will contribute to building a distinctive reputation. The types of content disseminated by universities via their social media accounts will contribute decisively to these objectives, since the way in which the different topics are communicated may influence the publics’ perceptions of these higher education institutions. This research analyses the different types of content disseminated by universities (in Europe, the United States and Latin America) via their accounts on social networks (Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn), to assess the main content topics that define the universities’ communicative positioning. A content analysis of the publications by universities on their social networks was carried out, representing an appropriate method to recognize the main themes and topics of their communication strategy. The results reveal two main thematic blocks of content: functional (teaching, research and social commitment topics) and institutional (organizational and contextual topics). Institutional publications are the most relevant block of content, far above the functional posts. In terms of specific topics, the organizational ones are the most common, well above publications on teaching or research, while contextual and social commitment content is used marginally. Most universities, in all regions and on all social networks, follow a dominant strategy of institutional content. So, the higher education institutions are mainly using social networks as a strategic tool for institutional positioning, more than informing about their daily activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

COVID-19 has greatly impacted science. It has become a global research front that constitutes a unique phenomenon of interest for the scientometric community. Accordingly, there has been a proliferation of descriptive studies on COVID-19 papers using altmetrics. Social media metrics serve to elucidate how research is shared and discussed, and one of the key points is to determine which factors are well-conditioned altmetric values. The main objective of this study is to analyze whether the altmetric mentions of COVID-19 medical studies are associated with the type of study and its level of evidence. Data were collected from the PubMed and Altmetric.com databases. A total of 16,672 publications by study types (e.g., case reports, clinical trials, or meta-analyses) that were published in the year 2021 and that had at least one altmetric mention were retrieved. The altmetric indicators considered were Altmetric Attention Score (AAS), news mentions, Twitter mentions, and Mendeley readers. Once the dataset of COVID-19 had been created, the first step was to carry out a descriptive study. Then, a normality hypothesis was evaluated by means of the Kolmogorov–Smirnov test, and since this was significant in all cases, the overall comparison of groups was performed using the nonparametric Kruskal–Wallis test. When this test rejected the null hypothesis, pairwise comparisons were performed with the Mann–Whitney U test, and the intensity of the possible association was measured using Cramer’s V coefficient. The results suggest that the data do not fit a normal distribution. The Mann–Whitney U test revealed coincidences in five groups of study types: The altmetric indicator with most coincidences was news mentions, and the study types with the most coincidences were the systematic reviews together with the meta-analyses, which coincided with four altmetric indicators. Likewise, between the study types and the altmetric indicators, a weak but significant association was observed through the chi-square and Cramer’s V. It can thus be concluded that the positive association between altmetrics and study types in medicine could reflect the level of the “pyramid” of scientific evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Social media have become key in political communication, playing a crucial role in election campaigns due to their fast, ubiquitous communication. This paper focuses on the comparison of the use of the social network Twitter in Spanish and French public and commercial television stations, during the last televised debates held during their general elections (2019 and 2022). It seeks to find whether conversation and interaction with their audiences take place, and whether these meet the dialogic principles set forth by Kent and Taylor adapted to Twitter by Ribalko and Seltzer to include usefulness of information, generation of return visits and dialogic loop preservation. To do this, the content of the general Twitter profiles of two French television stations, together with their profiles focused on informative content, were analyzed before, during and after the televised election debate held on 20 April. Likewise, the Twitter profiles corresponding to two Spanish television stations, together with the profiles corresponding to their news programs, were studied before, during and after the televised election debates held on 22 and 23 April. After screening all their posts, those referring to the debate and generating the largest engagement figures were selected, in order to compare the topics covered in the televised debates with those covered in Twitter. The results reveal that the information-focused accounts originate more posts whose content is linked to the televised debates, in contrast with the general accounts. Furthermore, both the unidirectionality of their content, and the lack of dialogue and interaction between these accounts and their audiences, become apparent, in addition to the minimal occurrence of "debate about the debate" flow among users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Internet and social networks are widely used by students. For higher education, which operates in a highly competitive environment, marketing is a fundamental tool for universities to distinguish themselves and attract new students. Social networks are one of the best options for influencing university choice. The objective of this study is to analyze the relationship between some indicators related to universities and their use of and results on social networks. We carried out quantitative correlational research to study the number of students and ranking position as university indicators as well as the number of followers, posts, and interactions (likes, comments, and shares) weekly and per post on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. Data were collected from 83 Spanish universities over 14 weeks in 2021. Correlation analysis showed that the number of students is closely related to the number of followers and interactions, although to varying degrees. The position of a university in the rankings exhibited a particularly significant correlation with their number of followers on almost all the networks. In addition, the higher the university in the ranking, the higher the number of interactions per post that it obtained on Facebook and Twitter. It was also found that universities with more followers had more interactions (likes, comments, and shares) with their posts. Finally, the number of posts was found to be positively related to the interactions per week but not to the interactions per post. This study has identified some significant relationships between the characteristics of all Spanish universities and their performance on four social networks, which may help universities become better at acting and communicating on them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is focused on the reproduction of ideologically charged messages whose origins or interests remain hidden from public opinion. There is an urgent need for transparency regarding polarised debates that deform, impede or distort the critical approach that any society should be able to construct concerning issues of great social interest, especially on social media platforms and networks. Research has shown that hostility has colonised digital communication through misogynist, homophobic, transphobic or xenophobic messages, among others, and that, for the most part, these are not spontaneous or individual interactions. In the virtual space, there are forces that, although invisible outside it, construct narratives, generate disinformation and feed generally regressive ideological approaches. Thus, in the name of transparency and social justice, there is an urgent need to investigate these types of messages, as well as their possible destabilising interests at a time of special presence and reputation of discourses such as the feminist one, which is currently experiencing a significant reactionary response. This paper investigates the origin and characteristics of the conversation on the social network Twitter concerning gender and sexual identities. To this end, we studied a significant sample of tweets (>1 million) related to women's rights, the LGBTIQ+ collective and trans people, for a full year. Computerised methodologies by means of machine learning techniques, natural language processing (NLP), determination of bots, geolocation, and the application of network theories were used to carry out the study. The results include the highly interrelated presence of groups without clear referents, as well as the existence of what appear to be coordinated networks aimed at causing harm and provoking confrontation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Almost a decade after the publication of The Psychodynamics of Social Networking, this article develops its thesis further by addressing the socio-cultural frame in which social media is embedded. The ways in which identity is expressed online are deeply tied to powerful undercurrents of culture change and development. The architecture of social media serves to limit the expression of identity by fragmenting users into disparate online identity-based communities that enforce in-group norms, amplify differences between groups, and inhibit productive dialogue, empathy, and understanding. This creates a "careful culture" where certainty is amplified at the expense of ambivalence, uncertainty, and open exploration and dialogue. Real life examples from social media are utilized to illustrate the underlying dynamics that activate them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The use of social media in orthopaedic surgery and its allied associations has not been studied. There are various associations which are actively engaged in social media platforms to enhance their impact with their users across the globe. We evaluated the social media presence and extent of involvement of orthopaedics journals and their publishing companies, orthopaedics organizations, orthopaedics device firms, and health organizations. Materials and methods: We compiled a global list of orthopaedics journals and publishing companies, orthopaedics organizations, orthopaedics device firms and health organizations affiliated to orthopaedics (USA) through the internet and their reliable online links. All the categories and their contents were screened on various social media networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn) in terms of their membership, likes, followers and active participation. Comparable variables were selected and compared. Results: Orthopaedics journals corresponding to sports and health were more notable than others on social networking platforms, i.e., British Journal of Sports Medicine and American Journal of Sports Medicine. Medscape, Lancet, and Elsevier being the multispeciality health and information publishing companies have remarkable participation on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Medtronic has maximum followers on all discussed social networking sites. Mayo Clinic Rochester, Minnesota and Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland, Ohio were more admired than other orthopaedics hospitals on Facebook and Twitter in USA. American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons was the most popular society on Facebook and LinkedIn while American Orthopaedics Society for Sports Medicine was most talked about on twitter. Conclusions: Although the active involvement of orthopaedics journals and their publishers is lower than multispecialty publishing companies but increasing trends were found recently. Orthopaedics organisations and device firms were actively involved on social networking while orthopaedics multispeciality health organizations associated with renowned universities have huge likes or followers. The social networking has the potential to flourish these journals and organisations in the near future as large populations over the globe have been actively participating and growing in their numbers exponentially [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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