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This study aimed to identify the motives for social media sites use in the general population and determine what personality traits (normal and maladaptive) predict different motives for social media sites use. Another objective was to analyze which motives for SMSs use are related to well-being. The sample consisted of 420 subjects (211 men, 209 women), mean age 40.29 years ( SD  =   14.93). Data were gathered using the Big Five Inventory, the Personality Inventory for DSM-5-Brief Form -Adult, the Mental Health Continuum-Short Form, and a scale designed ad hoc to evaluate the motives for social media sites use. The results showed that the most frequent motives were Personal relationship maintenance/Search for information, Pastime/Exhibitionism, and Search for companionship. In addition, it was found that normal and, especially, maladaptive personality traits increased the explained variance for the three motives for social media sites use, beyond age and gender. Predictors of relationship initiation and pastime/exhibitionism motives were related to more negative features (e.g., antagonism and disinhibition) than predictors of personal relationship maintenance/search for information. Finally, personal relationship maintenance/search for information was positively related to all the components of well-being, while the other motives for social media sites use were negatively associated with well-being.

Many theoretical accounts of addictive behaviors, including models of Internet use disorders, implicate cognitive biases in the formation and maintenance of excessive behaviors. Yet, little empirical evidence regarding the role of such biases, including implicit attitude, in the development and maintenance of excessive use of social media exists. We seek to bridge this gap in this study. To this end, we present the development of the Facebook Implicit Association Test (FIAT) and employ it in a sample of 220 Facebook users. The results (1) confirm the validity of the concept of implicit attitude and its measure in the context of social media, (2) demonstrate that implicit attitude is significantly positively associated with excessive use scores, in a magnitude similar to that observed for associations with substance use, and (3) show that implicit attitude is sheltered against social desirability bias, unlike self-reported and explicit measures, such as excessive use. Overall, this study builds theoretical and methodological foundations for further inquiries into the role of implicit attitude in research on the excessive use of social media., (Copyright © 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Background and aims The potential link between social casino gaming and online gambling has raised considerable concerns among clinicians, researchers and policy makers. Unfortunately, however, there is a paucity of research examining this potential link, especially among young adults. This represents a significant gap given young adults are frequently exposed to and are players of social casino games. Methods To better understand the potential link between social casino games and online gambling, we conducted three focus groups (N = 30) at two large Canadian Universities with college students who were avid social media users (who are regularly exposed to social casino games). Results Many participants spontaneously mentioned that social casino games were a great opportunity to build gambling skills before playing for real money. Importantly, some participants expressed a belief that there is a direct progression from social casino gaming to online gambling. Conversely, others believed the transition to online gambling depended on a person's personality, rather than mere exposure to social casino games. While many young adults in our focus groups felt immune to the effects of social casino games, there was a general consensus that social casino games may facilitate the transition to online gambling among younger teenagers (i.e., 12-14 yr olds), due to the ease of accessibility and early exposure. Discussion The results of the present research point to the need for more study on the effects of social casino gambling as well as a discussion concerning regulation of social casino games in order to minimize their potential risks.

According to media systems dependency theory, the more dependent a person is on the media for satisfying their needs, the more important the media will be to that person. This is particularly true in times of uncertainty such as health crises or natural disasters. While several studies have examined how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted international students' mental health in Canada and Australia, no study has looked at how international students studying in the United States used media and interpersonal channels during this global crisis. Therefore, we surveyed 194 US-based international students from four continents, representing 54 countries to answer this question. Results revealed that of all types of media, international students mostly relied on social media in English to meet information, orientation, and play needs during the pandemic. Cultural differences emerged in the reliance on friends for surveillance, relaxation, and orientation, with European students reporting contact with American friends more than international students from other continents. African students, on the other hand, reported significantly higher reliance on social media and their friends back home. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: social media consists of many applications like Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube and many more through which people communicate with each other. Over the past few years, the use of social media has increased tremendously. Apart from its advantages in our lives, increased use of social media has many health-related adverse effects like vision problems, sleep problems, depression and anxiety. This study aims to find the relationship between increased use of social media and its various health related adverse effects on the students of Khyber Medical College. Study type, settings & duration: This cross-sectional study conducted at Khyber Medical College, Peshawar from January to June 2020. Methodology: A sample size of 412 calculated using the WHO calculator for sample size and the sampling technique employed was a random sampling technique. The tool used to collect the data was questionnaire based; representative of each class group from first year to final year. SPSS Microsoft for Windows was used to analyze the data quantitatively. Results: Each variable was quantitatively weighed with a total of 63.8% of the study population exceeding 2 hours of recommended screen time. Of the various variables evaluated; depression, anxiety, disturbed sleep and vision problems showed a positive relationship with prolonged social media usage whereas use of sleep-inducing drugs were not related to prolonged social media usage. Conclusion: We were able to conclude from the comparison with previously conducted studies that health related problems have been on the rise due to increased utilization of social media apps which should be addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The affordance concept has been widely used in communication studies to theorize and examine social media use beyond specific features and practices. However, its implementation is characterized by an inconsistent use of terms and a neglect of the concept’s relationality. The present article demonstrates and addresses these shortcomings. First, it briefly reviews the affordance perspective’s origins and its further development in communication literature. Second, it outlines the perspective’s diverse but inconsistent application in social media research. Third, it introduces an integrated framework that contributes to a better understanding of affordances and supports a more precise use of the underlying concepts and terms in social media research. The framework a) emphasizes the relational nature of affordances as opportunities for action that occur in various technological and social contexts and are contingent on designed and cognitive mechanisms, b) it highlights the abstract nature of individual, relational, and collective affordances that are distinct from outcomes such as practices and structures, and c) it encompasses effects and dynamics that impact both technology and actors. Drawing on the framework, the article concludes with conceptional, empirical and terminological implications for future research approaching technology and social media use from an affordance perspective.

Copyright of Journal of Arts & Social Sciences (JASS) is the property of Sultan Qaboos University 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 purpose of this article is to investigate the formation of tourist-based destination brand brilliance as a differential advantage for a destination according to Alderson's differential theory. This will be done via content generated on social media sites by both destination management organizations and tourists, and through the mediating role of three dimensions of Aaker's brand equity model: awareness, image and perceived quality. Alderson's differential theory in a tourism context, and investigating the brilliance aspect of a brand, are both new research areas. Data was collected by electronically distributing questionnaires to 398 WhatsApp and Telegram users in Iran. This study confirms the relationship between tourist-generated content and destination brand brilliance through the mediating roles of awareness, image and perceived quality, but the content generated by the destination management organization to make a destination brand brilliant is only possible through the mediating roles of image and perceived quality. There is also a significant positive relationship between the perceived quality of a destination and the formation of destination brand brilliance. The findings of this research will help destination management organizations to better think about, and better manage, content generated on social media sites by organizations and tourists to form brilliance for their destination brand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present investigation is framed in the field of cyberpsychology. It aimed to analyze the predictive power of variables related to the use of social media sites --SMSs-- (i. e., connection time, type of use --passive / active--, motivations for use) and social comparison, on perceived psychological distress (i. e., depression, anxiety, stress). Furthermore, the mediating role of social comparison in the relationship between the passive use of SMSs and the perceived psychological distress, was also analyzed. It is important to study these topics since different international studies have shown inconsistent and contradictory results regarding the effects of SMSs use on individuals' well-being (e. g., Frison y Eggermont, 2015; Kraut et al., 2002; Nie et al., 2015). Consequently, some studies have focused on understanding whether the manner in which people use the networks, whether actively or passively, explains how technology impacts on users' well-being and/or psychological distress (Verduyn et al., 2015). The negative impact of passive use of SMSs can be explained by the Social Comparison Theory (Festinger, 1954), which suggests that people tend to evaluate themselves in comparison with others. These comparisons might generate negative effects on the individual (Giagkou et al., 2018) and, according to Lup et al. (2015), social comparison may be a mediating variable in this association. Regarding participants of the study, a convenience sample of 420 subjects of general population was studied (211 men, 209 women). The mean age was 40.29 years old (SD = 14.93). The majority of the participants (n = 278) lived in Buenos Aires City and surroundings. In terms of variables related to the use of SMSs, when asked about type of SMSs, most participants reported using more than one SMS, mainly Facebook (72 %) and Instagram (57 %). Regarding time spent on SMSs, 60 % of the respondents used their favorite SMS more than three times a day. The mean daily time engaged on all the SMSs exceeded five hours. Data were gathered using the Motives for SMSs use Scale (Lupano Perugini y Castro Solano, 2021a), the Iowa-Netherlands Comparison Orientation Measure (INCOM-E) (Buunk et al., 2005; Gibbons y Buunk, 1999), the Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scale (DASS-21) (Antúnez y Vinet, 2012; Lovibond y Lovibond, 1995). Furthermore, a survey to assess individuals' use of social networks was designed. The first part explored the most frequently used SMSs, the number and type of friends/followers, and the time spent on SMSs. The main SMSs were listed and participants were asked to indicate whether they used them or not, and if they did, they rated the amount of time spent on SMSs daily. The total amount of time per day was also surveyed. The second part of the survey was designed based on The Passive Active Use Measure (PAUM, Gerson et al., 2017) and some users' suggestions. This instrument assesses the frequency of certain activities performed on the networks to find out if participants make active use (e. g., posting information, commenting) or passive use (e. g., viewing profiles and posts, scrolling). The obtained results showed that social comparison is the main predictor of psychological distress. The motivation for use related to pass time / exhibitionism was also a significant predictor. In addition, an indirect effect of passive use on perceived psychological distress could be verified, considering social comparison as a mediating variable. Therefore, using the social networks passively would generate greater discomfort if the user tends to compare themselves with those who make the publications. The results of this study allow both users and healthcare and education providers to have greater knowledge of the consequences of using social media on individuals' overall well-being, and to promote their proper use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study belongs to the descriptive studies, as it seeks to identify “the extent to which university youth perceive the impact of the content presented through the accounts of influencers on social networking sites on themselves and others and its relationship to their social perceptions”, using the media survey of the views of a sample of university youth aged (18-21) years, totaling (374) students from Port Said University. The study reached a number of results, the most important of which are : 1-The high level of exposure of university youth, their friends and others to the pages of influencers on social networking sites, where the percentage of young people themselves was 93.6%, while the level of exposure of friends from the respondents’ point of view was 97.1%, while the level of exposure of others came from the respondents’ point of view by 92.5% Compared to 7.5% who are not exposed at all . 2 -There is a direct correlation with statistical significance between the rate of exposure of young people to the accounts of influencers through social networking sites and their level of awareness of their social reality . 3-There are statistically significant differences in the level of youth awareness of the effects of the content provided by social media influencers on themselves, on the one hand, and on their friends, and on others, on the other hand . 4 -There is a direct correlation with a statistical significance between the level of motives of youth exposure to the accounts of influencers on social networking sites and the level of their awareness of their social reality . 5 -There is a direct correlation between the rates of exposure of young people to the content presented through the accounts of influencers on social networking sites and the extent of their support for imposing censorship on it [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study is to elaborate the different factors which attract users to use social media sites. These main factors are subjective norms, image, efficiency and satisfaction along with the mediating role of perceived usefulness. Survey method was used to collect data from B2B fashion brands in Pakistan. Convenient sampling technique was used to collect data from targeted respondents. Collected data was analyzed using SmartPLS 3.3 version. Results express that subjective norms, image, efficiency and satisfaction have positive and significant impact on perceived usefulness and intention to use social media sites in B2B context within Pakistani fashion brands. Results further reveal that perceived usefulness partially mediates the relationship between subjective norms, image, efficiency, satisfaction and intention to use social media sites. This study will enhance the available literature in the area of technology acceptance model (TAM) and will provide useful insights to B2B managers to use efficiently use social media sites for the promotion of their brands. This study is limited to fashion brands, future researchers can expand this model to other area of business. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Larq Journal for Philosophy, Linguistics & Social Sciences is the property of Republic of Iraq Ministry of Higher Education & Scientific Research (MOHESR) 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 Global Journal of Economics & Business is the property of Refaad for Studies, Research & Development 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 IUG Journal of Humanitarian Research is the property of Islamic University of Gaza 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 growing number of ageing consumers and their increasingly active engagement in social media platforms present a great opportunity for digital marketing to the grey market. However, the potential of this segment has been underrated by both marketers and marketing scholars. The empirical belief of senior consumers' technological illiteracy somewhat discourages industrial and academic approaches to seeking the answer to some critical questions such as what older consumers think about social media‐based advertising, influencers, or peer communications. Thus, this study aims to explore and explain older consumers' social media‐related behaviour through (a) delving into motives behind their frequently used social media site(s), (b) investigating older consumers' purchase behaviour aspects (i.e., determinant(s) to purchase decisions, favoured shopping modes), (c) discovering what senior consumers think about social media‐based advertising, influencers, and peer communications, and (d) evaluating the impact of social media on older consumers' purchase behaviour. Five key themes emerging from the adopted qualitative approach are (1) Facebook predominance, (2) Scepticism, (3) Price sensitivity, (4) Asymmetric social influences, and (5) Favoured physical store shopping. Each finding is demonstrated in a detailed causal explanation. Academic contributions and implications for social media marketers are highlighted and discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media has become an indispensable part of human life as a result of digitalization, and the promotional activities on these platforms have gradually increased. Influencer marketing through Instagram, which is an application for photo and video sharing, has been one of the popular tools for product promotion, especially in recent years. In this context, it is aimed to make a content analysis of influencer marketing on Instagram in this article. Between October and December 2019, 601 posts shared by two Turkish and two foreign influencers in the fashion industry with the most brand interaction and product promotion were analyzed according to 10 criteria. Criterion sampling method was used in the research. Results showed that more than %64 of mostly high fashion posting influencers‟ posts includes fashion product promotion in accordance with their profession the fashion sector. Influencers tend to do product promotions via photos rather than videos and mostly promote clothes and foreign brands. They also prefer to put the products to forefront. Moreover, it is observed that the influencers prefer distant shots, simplicity in visual density and central positioning for the products in their promotions. The brands promoted by influencers who mostly prefer advertisement in their promotions as a form of displaying products are listed in the results section of this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Al-Bahith Al-Aalami is the property of Republic of Iraq Ministry of Higher Education & Scientific Research (MOHESR) 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 Journal of Arts & Social Sciences (JASS) is the property of Sultan Qaboos University 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.)

Nowadays, social media sites and applications such as Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and blogs gained much attention, because organizations use this huge information to monitor the user opinions. Therefore, the researchers focused on sentiment analysis to help organizations for better production. But, the existing studies concentrated only on document-level in the analysis, where the details of the sentiments are not considered. In order to perform a fine-grained analysis, this research study uses the aspect-based sentiment analysis on Twitter data for finding the opinions of users. In general, a raw tweet contains stop words, Uniform Resource Locator (URL), emoji that are reduced in the stage of pre-processing. The polarities of pre-processed tweets are identified, then two important feature extraction techniques are used to extract the useful information. The specific sentiments with various aspects of services are extracted by using aspect-based feature extraction, which are given as an input for Bi-directional Gated Recurrent Unit (BGRU)for classification. The learning rate of BGRU is further improved by incorporating the self-attention layers. To test the efficiency of the proposed method, the experiments are conducted on real-time collected tweets in terms of accuracy, precision, recall and f-score. The results showed that the developed method achieved 80.4% accuracy, 81% precision, 80% of recall and f-score for 1000 dataset length when compared with traditional techniques: Long-short term Memory (LSTM)and standard GRU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent studies suggest that users' preferences of social media use differ according to their individual differences and use motives, and that these factors can lead to problematic social media use (PSMU) among a minority of users. The objectives of the present study were to investigate the influences of (i) demographics and Big Five personality dimensions on social media use motives; (ii) demographics and use motives on social media site preferences; and (iii) demographics, personality, popular social media sites, and social media use motives on PSMU. The sample comprised 1008 undergraduate students, aged between 17 and 32 years (M = 20.49, SD = 1.73; 60.5% women). The participants completed a questionnaire comprising the Social Media Use Questionnaire, Social Media Usage Aims Scale, and Ten-Item Personality Inventory. Multiple linear and hierarchical regression analyses showed that social media use motives of (i) meeting new people and socializing, (ii) expressing or presenting a more popular self, and (iii) passing time and entertainment were associated with problematic social media use. Moreover, participants that preferred Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook reported higher scores of problematic social media use. Finally, being female, introverted, conscientious, agreeable, and neurotic were associated with PSMU. The findings offer empirical evidence for uses and gratifications theory because the findings demonstrated that (i) different personality traits predict different motives, (ii) different motives predict preference of different platforms, and (iii) different individual differences such as personality, preference of platform, and specific use motives predict PSMU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social Media (SM) have been established as multifunctional networking tools that tend to offer an increasingly wider variety of services, making it difficult to determine their core purpose and mission, therefore, their type. This paper assesses this evolution of Social Media Types (SMTs), presents, and evaluates a novel hypothesis-based data driven methodology for analyzing Social Media Platforms (SMPs) and categorizing SMTs. We review and update literature regarding the categorization of SMPs, based on their services. We develop a methodology to propose and evaluate a new taxonomy, comprising: (i) the hypothesis that the number of SMTs is smaller than what current literature suggests, (ii) observations on data regarding SM usage and (iii) experimentation using association rules and clustering algorithms. As a result, we propose three (3) SMTs, namely Social, Entertainment and Profiling networks, typically capturing emerging SMP services. Our results show that our hypothesis is validated by implementing our methodology and we discuss threats to validity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aimed to identify the effectiveness of the respondents' use of social media in social accountability in three key issues: Improving services, detecting corruption issues and empowering the marginalized in society by applying the survey on (200) social networking users, as well as interviewing a number of administrators of social accountability pages and groups via social networking site (Facebook). Results of the study Showed a negative correlation between the use of Facebook in the social accountability, improving the services and detecting corrupt in issues at the significance points (01,), and (05,), Respectively, there was a negative and statistically non-controversial link between using Facebook as social accountability and empowerment of the marginalized individuals in community from the perspective of the respondents Results on Twitter’s effectiveness in social accountability has revealed a statistically positive correlation between Twitter’s uses for social accountability, improved services, and empowering the marginalized. Meanwhile a statistically negative correlation between using Twitter for social accountability and the disclosure of corruption issues in society from the perspective of the respondents. Results also showed significant differences among respondents in their appreciation of how far the contribution of the number of complaints (social accountability) through social networking sites in improving the services provided to citizens in Egyptian society, uncover corruption issues, and empower marginalized groups, according to how they get respond to their complaints, as those who got response for their concerns adopt a positive attitude toward social accountability through social media sites [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media is increasingly important in daily life and is an especially important social interaction mechanism for young people. Although research has been conducted evaluating user types based on motives for using social media, no such framework has been extended to social media websites. We extend previous research by evaluating the underlying structure of social media website usage motivations using a 13 item survey and evaluations from 19 different social media websites administered to 1686 young Americans. Using a multidimensional scaling approach, we uncover 2 major motive dimensions underlying social media website use: fun-related and content-specific. Based on the derived dimensions, we generate a graphical "quadrant" system for classifying social media websites and depict all 19 social media sites based on their quadrant. We propose that our quadrant system can be used by other researchers to further refine understanding of social media website usage motives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] Introduces social media involvement and social media satisfaction to TAM 3. [•] Provides insights into the underpinning of the process of social media usage. [•] Determines that involvement and satisfaction are dual mediators on usage intention. [•] Social media satisfaction shows a significant effect on usage intention. [•] The strength of the path coefficients in the model varies by the country data set. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In this paper, we present Forum Crawler Under Supervision (FoCUS), a supervised web-scale forum crawler. The goal of FoCUS is to crawl relevant forum content from the web with minimal overhead. Forum threads contain information content that is the target of forum crawlers. Although forums have different layouts or styles and are powered by different forum software packages, they always have similar implicit navigation paths connected by specific URL types to lead users from entry pages to thread pages. Based on this observation, we reduce the web forum crawling problem to a URL-type recognition problem. And we show how to learn accurate and effective regular expression patterns of implicit navigation paths from automatically created training sets using aggregated results from weak page type classifiers. Robust page type classifiers can be trained from as few as five annotated forums and applied to a large set of unseen forums. Our test results show that FoCUS achieved over 98 percent effectiveness and 97 percent coverage on a large set of test forums powered by over 150 different forum software packages. In addition, the results of applying FoCUS on more than 100 community Question and Answer sites and Blog sites demonstrated that the concept of implicit navigation path could apply to other social media sites. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]