Abstract
A dramatic increase has been registered in the number of social media posts in photo form as well as in hashtag activism. Hashtags, which manifest thoughts and feelings clearly and concisely, originated on Twitter, where the length of a post is limited; their use, however, has expanded into other social media services, including Instagram. Hashtags, which make it easy to find and express support for posts of interest, have been widely used for online activism, although they have been criticized for fostering confirmation bias. Moreover, hashtag activism in photo form has been relatively understudied. This research analyzed Instagram photos with antivaccination hashtags as an example of hashtag activism through photos. In addition, we examined how the photo features were related to public response, which was manifested via engagement and comment sentiment. The results suggest that the photos which were categorized into “text” took the largest share. It was also found that the major way of claiming was to imprint key messages that persuade people not to vaccinate with remarks from professionals on photos and provide a source of supporting information in the post text with hashtags of antivaccine intention. Various photo features showed associations with engagement and comment sentiment, but the directions of correlation were usually the opposite: these results suggest that engagement and comment sentiment are separate domains that reveal different public responses.
Highlights
Social media has been playing an increasingly influential role in expressing one’s opinion online, and the means of expression utilizing the functions of social media are various, with hashtags being one of the most popular ones
The present study aims to explore how the antivaccination movement is represented on Instagram
We examined the association between photo features and comment sentiment, and the results are displayed in Table 5, which shows that most face features were significantly associated with comment sentiment rather than engagement
Summary
Social media has been playing an increasingly influential role in expressing one’s opinion online, and the means of expression utilizing the functions of social media are various, with hashtags being one of the most popular ones. The hashtag is known to have been first introduced by Twitter, it is widely used on other social media services. It serves as a guide for finding and following posts of interest and as a marker that shows one’s stance on an issue explicitly and succinctly [1]. These characteristics make the hashtag a useful tool for activists who need an efficient way to widely disseminate their belief and interactively communicate with the public. Individual users or activists devise tags that manifest their belief on an issue concisely and attach them to their social media posts; users or activists who
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