Review
Social Issues
Aqdas Malik, Walter Berggren, Adil S. Al-Busaidi
Summary: This review summarizes the methodological techniques and approaches used for categorically coding Instagram-based data about tobacco. The results show that e-cigarettes were the most frequently investigated tobacco product and human coding and machine-learning techniques were commonly used.
TECHNOLOGY IN SOCIETY
(2022)
Review
Health Care Sciences & Services
Alicia Chung, Dorice Vieira, Tiffany Donley, Nicholas Tan, Girardin Jean-Louis, Kathleen Kiely Gouley, Azizi Seixas
Summary: The scoping review revealed the significant influence of social media on eating behaviors among adolescent peer groups, including impact on fruit and vegetable intake, fast food advertising, and prevention of eating disorder relapse among youth. Strategies should be considered to engage adolescents in promoting positive dietary behaviors through targeted network-driven approaches.
JOURNAL OF MEDICAL INTERNET RESEARCH
(2021)
Article
Social Sciences, Interdisciplinary
Drina Intyaswati, Eni Maryani, Dadang Sugiana, Anter Venus
Summary: This study, involving 508 undergraduate students from Open University in Indonesia, found that students' political knowledge is influenced by their discussions on political issues on social media platforms. The results suggest that instructors can utilize social media to facilitate political discussions among students, thus enhancing their political knowledge acquisition.
Article
Green & Sustainable Science & Technology
Qian Zhou, Xiaoling Zhang, Yu Cao, Wei Wei, Baiyu Wu
Summary: Social media has become a vital distribution channel for market campaigning, providing support for firms' marketing decisions. Offering a better information service attracts more potential customers, and firms with strong social relationships on social media are more willing to provide such services.
JOURNAL OF CLEANER PRODUCTION
(2022)
Article
Computer Science, Information Systems
Jo Cheriyan, Jyothisha J. Nair
Summary: This article discusses the dynamics of information diffusion and its goals in the network. Two strategies are proposed to minimize the influence of negative information by reducing its entropy. The effectiveness of the proposed system is validated through user response and surveillance on real-time networks.
Article
Health Care Sciences & Services
Maija Hirvonen, Carrie Purcell, Lawrie Elliott, Julia Bailey, Sharon Anne Simpson, Lisa McDaid, Laurence Moore, Kirstin Rebecca Mitchell
Summary: There is a strong interest in utilizing social media for spreading positive sexual health messages among young people, but challenges include reluctance to engage visibly with sexual health content online and lack of trust in peer sources. This study explored the opportunities and obstacles of using social media to facilitate peer-sharing of sexual health messages within a school-based intervention, highlighting the importance of integrating online interaction with offline conversations for effective dissemination.
JOURNAL OF MEDICAL INTERNET RESEARCH
(2021)
Article
Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence
Chen Gao, Tzu-Heng Lin, Nian Li, Depeng Jin, Yong Li
Summary: Social e-commerce is a new concept that utilizes social media as a prevalent platform for online shopping. This paper addresses the problem of cross-platform recommendation for social e-commerce, proposing a recommendation framework called CROSS that considers both user-item interaction data and social relation data. Experimental results on two real-world social e-commerce datasets demonstrate that CROSS significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON KNOWLEDGE AND DATA ENGINEERING
(2023)
Review
Substance Abuse
Scott Donaldson, Allison Dormanesh, Anuja Majmundar, Cindy Perez, Heather Lopez, Megan Saghian, Trista A. Beard, Jennifer B. Unger, Jon-Patrick Allem
Summary: This study summarized the literature that analyzed tobacco-related social media data, including domain, social media platform, tobacco product type, and themes of findings, among other variables.
NICOTINE & TOBACCO RESEARCH
(2023)
Article
Health Care Sciences & Services
Elena L. Pokowitz, Bryan J. Stiles, Riya Thomas, Katherine Bullard, Kelsey A. Ludwig, John F. Gleeson, Mario Alvarez-Jimenez, Diana O. Perkins, David L. Penn
Summary: The study qualitatively characterized the experiences of American users in the recent open trial of the Horyzons digital platform. Through interviews with 20 users, the researchers identified seven prominent themes related to self-determination theory. The platform's features, interactions with therapists and peers, and personalized therapeutic content were found to support users' autonomy, competence, and relatedness, while also highlighting areas for improvement in the platform.
Article
Psychology, Multidisciplinary
Federica Angelini, Claudia Marino, Gianluca Gini
Summary: This study examined the effects of social media features, online social support, and online expressions of emotions on friendship quality among adolescents. The findings revealed significant associations between different social media features and dimensions of friendship quality, and significant differences among gender and social media user groups.
CURRENT PSYCHOLOGY
(2022)
Article
Computer Science, Hardware & Architecture
Guangchi Liu, Qing Yang, Honggang Wang, Alex X. Liu
Summary: This paper proposes the three-valued subjective logic (3VSL) model to assess trust in online social networks, and further designs the AssessTrust (AT) algorithm to accurately compute trust between any two users. Experimental results validate that 3VSL can accurately model trust between indirectly connected users.
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON DEPENDABLE AND SECURE COMPUTING
(2021)
Article
Engineering, Multidisciplinary
Lynnette Hui Xian Ng, Kathleen M. Carley
Summary: Social influence plays a significant role in shaping individuals' stances in a complex social environment. In online social networks, two factors, namely endogenous and exogenous influences, contribute to the sway of stances. Endogenous influences stem from an individual's innate beliefs and past stances, while exogenous influences arise from social network interactions. Understanding user susceptibility through these influences can improve predictive accuracy for stance changes. This study focuses on predicting Twitter agents susceptible to flipping their stances on the coronavirus vaccine, achieving an 86% accuracy rate using a social influence model.
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON NETWORK SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING
(2023)
Review
Public, Environmental & Occupational Health
Ai Yamashita, Aya Isumi, Takeo Fujiwara
Summary: Online peer support groups are common and can provide informational and emotional support to young mothers. They have shown some positive effects on mothers' mental well-being, but minimal effects on behavioral modification for children and breastfeeding. Further research is needed.
JOURNAL OF EPIDEMIOLOGY
(2022)
Article
Education & Educational Research
R. A. Crane, S. Comley
Summary: Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are effective, flexible, and allow large participation in distance learning. Social Learners who engage in MOOC forums are more likely to complete the courses, despite being in the minority compared to Non-Social Learners. Further research is needed to understand the value of Social Learning and its impact on student retention in MOOCs.
EDUCATION AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES
(2021)
Article
Ecology
Cassandra L. Raby, Joah R. Madden
Summary: In a recent medium-sized online conference, delegates exhibited varying levels of engagement with different components of the meeting. Talks were popular, but participation in social and networking opportunities was inconsistent. To enhance effective communication and networking, future online conference organizers may consider implementing the six recommendations provided.
ECOLOGY AND EVOLUTION
(2021)
Article
Substance Abuse
Julia C. Chen-Sankey, Afton Kechter, Jessica Barrington-Trimis, Rob McConnell, Evan A. Krueger, Tess Boley Cruz, Jennifer B. Unger, Benjamin W. Chaffee, Adam Leventhal
Summary: This study assessed the effects of a hypothetical Modified Risk Tobacco Product claim on young adults' intention and perceptions of using heated tobacco products. The results showed that the claim may lower young adults' harm perceptions of heated tobacco products compared to cigarettes, but did not significantly change overall intention to use these products, except for e-cigarette users who showed a larger effect. This raises concerns about whether the claim may promote dual use among young e-cigarette users.
Editorial Material
Substance Abuse
Julia Vassey, Jon-Patrick Allem, Joshua Barker, Tess Boley Cruz, Raina Pang, Jennifer B. Unger, Heather Lynn Wipfli, Matthew Kirkpatrick
Article
Substance Abuse
Julia Vassey, Tom Valente, Joshua Barker, Cassandra Stanton, Dongmei Li, Linnea Laestadius, Tess Boley Cruz, Jennifer B. Unger
Summary: In 2020, there were 55 highly interconnected e-cigarette influencers worldwide collaborating with over 600 e-cigarette brands. Asian and US influencers had five to six times more teenage followers compared with European influencers. 75% of influencers did not restrict youth access to their promotional content on Instagram.
Article
Public, Environmental & Occupational Health
Jennifer B. Unger, Daniel Soto, Ryan Lee, Sohini Deva, Kush Shanker, Neeraj Sood
Summary: This qualitative study assessed attitudes toward in-school COVID-19 testing among four groups of stakeholders: school administrators, teachers, parents, and high school students. The findings indicated that frequent testing could increase the actual safety and perceived safety of the school environment, but there were concerns about financial cost, logistics, physical discomfort, and stigma associated with positive results.
HEALTH PROMOTION PRACTICE
(2023)
Article
Substance Abuse
Anuja Majmundar, Zheng Xue, Samuel Asare, Nigar Nargis
Summary: In this study, we investigated the public interest in shopping for JUUL and Puff Bar products from 2019 to 2021 and analyzed the impact of various regulatory, company sales policy, and other events on the trajectory of these products. The results showed that after certain significant events, the shopping interest and sales of JUUL declined while those of Puff Bar peaked.
Article
Substance Abuse
Anuja Majmundar, Cindy Perez, Marlene Huerta, Jennifer B. Unger, Jon-Patrick Allem
Summary: This study analyzed the impact of internet memes on vaping and found that these memes may normalize smoking behaviors and have an influence on the attitudes and behaviors of young people. Therefore, future research should continue to monitor the emergence of vaping-related memes in order to address them in anti-smoking campaigns.
SUBSTANCE USE & MISUSE
(2023)
Editorial Material
Substance Abuse
Anuja Majmundar, Zheng Xue, Samuel Asare, Catherine MacMahon, Cathy Callaway, Lisa Lacasse, Ahmedin Jemal, Nigar Nargis
Article
Public, Environmental & Occupational Health
Scott I. Donaldson, Allison Dormanesh, Cindy Perez, Muhammad O. Zaffer, Anuja Majmundar, Jennifer B. Unger, Jon-Patrick Allem
Summary: This study analyzed videos posted on the official YouTube channels of seven e-cigarette companies to determine their themes and user engagement. The results showed that these videos mainly focused on branding and user experience, with little mention of cessation. However, cessation-related videos received the highest number of dislikes. Future research should examine the impact of exposure to e-cigarette-related content on YouTube and its effects on attitudes and behaviors.
HEALTH EDUCATION & BEHAVIOR
(2023)
Editorial Material
Substance Abuse
Julia Vassey, Jennifer B. B. Unger
Summary: The study found that tobacco-related promotional content on social media often features young-looking influencers, models, or brand ambassadors who are appealing to youth. Their posts often lack consistent disclosures of partnerships with tobacco brands and age-restrictions prohibiting access to underage users.
SUBSTANCE USE & MISUSE
(2023)
Article
Substance Abuse
Scott Donaldson, Trista Beard, Allison Dormanesh, Cindy Perez, Patricia Escobedo, Jennifer B. Unger, Heather Lynn Wipfli, Artur Galimov, Jon-Patrick Allem
Summary: This study conducted a content analysis of website marketing from leading e-cigarette companies selling products in California. Findings from the study showed that 50.0% of the websites had marketing themes related to the physical health benefits of e-cigarette use, and more than half of the websites offered sales, discounts, and coupons.
Article
Public, Environmental & Occupational Health
Jennifer B. Unger, Emma Herzig, Viviana Rodriguez, Daniel Soto, Ryan Lee, Neeraj Sood
Summary: Despite the availability of COVID-19 vaccines, vaccine uptake is low among U.S. Hispanic communities, especially adolescents. A study of high school students in Hispanic neighborhoods of Los Angeles County found that belief in the effectiveness of the vaccine and self-efficacy to get vaccinated were associated with higher vaccination rates. Perceived severity and vulnerability to COVID-19 did not influence vaccination rates. Health communications and outreach efforts are needed to increase vaccine acceptance among Hispanic adolescents.
PREVENTIVE MEDICINE REPORTS
(2023)
Review
Substance Abuse
Trista A. Beard, Scott Donaldson, Jennifer B. Unger, Jon-Patrick Allem
Summary: This study examines the extent to which tobacco-related social media research is cited in government policy documents. A total of 38 government policy documents were found to cite social media research on tobacco-related issues. The research was often used to highlight tobacco industry marketing practices, draw attention to youth e-cigarette use, and understand tobacco-related attitudes and behaviors through social media platforms.
NICOTINE & TOBACCO RESEARCH
(2023)
Article
Substance Abuse
Jon-Patrick Allem, Scott Donaldson, Erin A. Vogel, Raina D. Pang, Jennifer B. Unger
Summary: This study analyzed public reaction to the proposed ban on menthol cigarettes using Twitter data. The findings showed that Twitter posts commonly discussed distrust in government and mentioned racial discrimination. The study demonstrated the possibility of monitoring public opinion in real-time through Twitter and highlighted the importance of educating the public about the potential health benefits of banning menthol.
NICOTINE & TOBACCO RESEARCH
(2023)
Article
Substance Abuse
Jon-Patrick Allem, Viviana Rodriguez, Monica Pattarroyo, Carla M. Ramirez, Trista A. Beard, Daniel Soto, Scott Donaldson, Jennifer B. Unger
Summary: This study summarized tobacco-related discussions in Spanish on Twitter. Content analysis revealed themes such as product promotion, health warnings, tobacco use, health benefits of vaping, cannabis use, cessation, addiction, policy, and polysubstance use. Most tweets were neutral in sentiment.
NICOTINE & TOBACCO RESEARCH
(2023)
Article
Public, Environmental & Occupational Health
Jon-Patrick Allem, Manan Biyani, Brad J. Bushman
Summary: Gun violence is a public health crisis in the USA, and publicly accessible data from Twitter can provide valuable insights into the public's conversations on this issue. This study analyzed gun-related tweets from January to June 2022 and identified major topics, including gun ownership control, gun safety concerns, the impact on children and schools, and the Second Amendment. The study also found discussions related to specific events, such as the Capitol Riots and the Russia-Ukraine War. The influence of the National Rifle Association (NRA) on gun policies and pro-gun ownership perspectives was also part of the discourse. The intersection between alcohol, substance use, and gun use was rarely observed. The findings highlight the importance of monitoring gun-related conversations on social media platforms like Twitter for public health researchers.
PREVENTION SCIENCE
(2023)