Social Media Attention Research Articles

Public Affairs Office, August–October 19, 2015, ESA Governing Board Report

Public Affairs Office, August–October 19, 2015, ESA Governing Board Report

Virtual maltreatment: Sexualisation and social media abuse in sport

Virtual maltreatment is a rapidly emerging and highly significant issue within contemporary sport. This study examines such behaviour by exploring the negative social media attention that tennis player Mana Sharapova received during the 2015 Wimbledon tennis championships. Using a netnographic approach, an analysis of two popular social media platforms (Facebook and Twitter) was conducted to examine the social commentary surrounding this athlete during the event. Three primary themes emerged from the analysis of data on these platforms: ‘admiration of her physical beauty and/or sexualisation’; ‘threatening physical and/or sexual contact’ and ‘emotionally ridiculing and/or criticising’. These findings demonstrate how social media provides a space for unregulated physical and sexual abuse of female athletes in a way that traditional sports media does not. Virtual abuse and maltreatment is identified as a significant social problem which requires further consideration in academic literature.

Risk perception of food safety issue on social media

This study aims to investigate individuals’ risk perceptions of food safety by extending the heuristic and systematic information processing model (HSM) to the social media context. Specifically, we examine the predictors of risk perceptions of food safety, including social media attention, social media credibility, as well as systematic and heuristic processing. A convenient sample of 640 adults was collected in China. Structural equation modeling was used to test the effects of social media attention and social media credibility on public risk perceptions of food safety, with information processing as mediating factors. The findings indicated that social media attention and social media credibility motivate systematic processing, which in turn promote risk perception of food safety. However, the mediating effect of heuristic processing was not found. Implications for theory and practice were discussed.

Welcoming and celebrating diversity: The Uniting journey of learning on inclusive practice

Welcoming and celebrating diversity: The Uniting journey of learning on inclusive practice

Twitter-Based Analysis of the Dynamics of Collective Attention to Political Parties.

Large-scale data from social media have a significant potential to describe complex phenomena in the real world and to anticipate collective behaviors such as information spreading and social trends. One specific case of study is represented by the collective attention to the action of political parties. Not surprisingly, researchers and stakeholders tried to correlate parties' presence on social media with their performances in elections. Despite the many efforts, results are still inconclusive since this kind of data is often very noisy and significant signals could be covered by (largely unknown) statistical fluctuations. In this paper we consider the number of tweets (tweet volume) of a party as a proxy of collective attention to the party, identify the dynamics of the volume, and show that this quantity has some information on the election outcome. We find that the distribution of the tweet volume for each party follows a log-normal distribution with a positive autocorrelation of the volume over short terms, which indicates the volume has large fluctuations of the log-normal distribution yet with a short-term tendency. Furthermore, by measuring the ratio of two consecutive daily tweet volumes, we find that the evolution of the daily volume of a party can be described by means of a geometric Brownian motion (i.e., the logarithm of the volume moves randomly with a trend). Finally, we determine the optimal period of averaging tweet volume for reducing fluctuations and extracting short-term tendencies. We conclude that the tweet volume is a good indicator of parties' success in the elections when considered over an optimal time window. Our study identifies the statistical nature of collective attention to political issues and sheds light on how to model the dynamics of collective attention in social media.

Competing for Attention in Social Media under Information Overload Conditions.

Modern social media are becoming overloaded with information because of the rapidly-expanding number of information feeds. We analyze the user-generated content in Sina Weibo, and find evidence that the spread of popular messages often follow a mechanism that differs from the spread of disease, in contrast to common belief. In this mechanism, an individual with more friends needs more repeated exposures to spread further the information. Moreover, our data suggest that for certain messages the chance of an individual to share the message is proportional to the fraction of its neighbours who shared it with him/her, which is a result of competition for attention. We model this process using a fractional susceptible infected recovered (FSIR) model, where the infection probability of a node is proportional to its fraction of infected neighbors. Our findings have dramatic implications for information contagion. For example, using the FSIR model we find that real-world social networks have a finite epidemic threshold in contrast to the zero threshold in disease epidemic models. This means that when individuals are overloaded with excess information feeds, the information either reaches out the population if it is above the critical epidemic threshold, or it would never be well received.

Trend Dynamics and Attention in Chinese Social Media

We analyzed the temporal aspect of trends and trend-setters in Sina Weibo, contrasting it with earlier observations of Twitter. We found a vast difference in the content shared in China as compared with a global social network such as Twitter. In China, the trends are created almost entirely due to the retweets of media content such as jokes, images, and videos, unlike Twitter where trends have more to do with current global events and news stories. On closer inspection, we observed that most trends in Sina Weibo are due to the continuous retweets of a small percentage of fraudulent accounts, set up to artificially inflate certain posts. This reveals evidence of an “Internet Water Army,” a unique promotional method deployed by public relations companies in China to influence the popular dissemination of information in online social networks.

Erratum to: The open access advantage considering citation, article usage and social media attention

Erratum to: The open access advantage considering citation, article usage and social media attention

The open access advantage considering citation, article usage and social media attention

In this study, we compare the difference in the impact between open access (OA) and non-open access (non-OA) articles. 1761 Nature Communications articles published from 1 Jan. 2012 to 31 Aug. 2013 are selected as our research objects, including 587 OA articles and 1174 non-OA articles. Citation data and daily updated article-level metrics data are harvested directly from the platform of nature.com. Data is analyzed from the static versus temporal-dynamic perspectives. The OA citation advantage is confirmed, and the OA advantage is also applicable when extending the comparing from citation to article views and social media attention. More important, we find that OA papers not only have the great advantage of total downloads, but also have the feature of keeping sustained and steady downloads for a long time. For article downloads, non-OA papers only have a short period of attention, when the advantage of OA papers exists for a much longer time.

Social Media and Online Attention as an Early Measure of the Impact of Research in Solid Organ Transplantation

Traditional measures of the impact of published research, such as citation counts, are limited to measuring academic impact. The use of social media and other online tools as alternative measures of research impact is gaining popularity and used by leading medical journals. MEDLINE was searched for articles published with subject headings relating to solid organ transplantation between August 1, 2011, and July 31, 2012. Citation data were retrieved from SCOPUS, and statistics regarding mentions in social media, social bookmarking sites, news outlets, and expert recommendation sites were retrieved from the data at www.altmetric.com. Data were analyzed for associations between alternative metric data and citation rates. The search retrieved 6,981 publications. Sixty-six percent of the articles had at least one citation. Mentions in social media were 19.3%, 13.1% had social bookmarks, 0.9% had expert recommendations, and online news outlets picked up eight articles. Significantly higher citation rates were associated with mention in social media, expert recommendation, social bookmarking, and for articles identified as meta-analyses, multicenter studies, randomized controlled trials, and reviews (all P<0.001). The odds of an article being highly cited were significantly increased by a mention in social media (odds ratio, 2.58; P<0.001). Qualitative analysis suggests that article topics discussed on social media are more likely to relate to the more controversial and emotive areas of transplantation. Social media and online attention act as early predictors of the impact of transplant research as measured by later citation rate. Blogging and expert recommendation, in particular, are associated with higher citation rates.

Modeling dynamics of attention in social media with user efficiency

Evolution of online social networks is driven by the need of their members to shareand consume content, resulting in a complex interplay between individual activity andattention received from others. In a context of increasing information overload andlimited resources, discovering which are the most successful behavioral patterns toattract attention is very important. To shed light on the matter, we look into thepatterns of activity and popularity of users in the Yahoo Meme microblogging service.We observe that a combination of different type of social and content-producingactivity is necessary to attract attention and the efficiency of users, namely theaverage attention received per piece of content published, for many users has adefined trend in its temporal footprint. The analysis of the user time series ofefficiency shows different classes of users whose different activity patterns giveinsights on the type of behavior that pays off best in terms of attention gathering.In particular, sharing content with high spreading potential and then supporting theattention raised by it with social activity emerges as a frequent pattern for usersgaining efficiency over time.

Dynamics of Trends and Attention in Chinese Social Media

There has been a tremendous rise in the growth of online social networks all over the world in recent years. It has facilitated users to generate a large amount of real-time content at an incessant rate, all competing with each other to attract enough attention and become popular trends. While Western online social networks such as Twitter have been well studied, the popular Chinese microblogging network Sina Weibo has had relatively lower exposure. In this paper, we analyze in detail the temporal aspect of trends and trend-setters in Sina Weibo, contrasting it with earlier observations in Twitter. We find that there is a vast difference in the content shared in China when compared to a global social network such as Twitter. In China, the trends are created almost entirely due to the retweets of media content such as jokes, images and videos, unlike Twitter where it has been shown that the trends tend to have more to do with current global events and news stories.We take a detailed look at the formation, persistence and decay of trends and examine the key topics that trend in Sina Weibo. One of our key findings is that retweets are much more common in Sina Weibo and contribute a lot to creating trends. When we look closer, we observe that most trends in Sina Weibo are due to the continuous retweets of a small percentage of fraudulent accounts. These fake accounts are set up to artificially inflate certain posts, causing them to shoot up into Sina Weibo's trending list, which are in turn displayed as the most popular topics to users.

Social Media Hype in Times of Crises: Nature, Characteristics and Impact on Organizations

This article extends Vasterman’s ( 2005 ) concept of media hype by analyzing how it applies in the social media context. It then develops the concept of social media hype, its nature, characteristics through examination of five cases that attracted much social media attention. Social media hype can be defined as a netizen-generated hype that causes huge interest that is triggered by a key event and sustained by a self-reinforcing quality in its ability for users to engage in conversation. It involves a trigger event, followed by interest waves, and sustaining of the interests on different social media platforms. In response, organizations should pay heed to rigorously monitored sentiments online, respond quickly in the same medium in which the hype occurs, sharing consistent message across all mediums, and most importantly, value relationships with stakeholders.

More Harm Than Good? Online Media Use and Political Disaffection Among College Students in the 2008 Election

This study examines the ways in which online media influenced political disaffection among young adults during the 2008 presidential election campaign. The effects of social media attention, online expression, and traditional Internet sources on political cynicism, apathy, and skepticism were evaluated using data from an online survey of college students. Results show that attention to social media for campaign information is positively related to cynicism and apathy and negatively related to skepticism. Online expression has a positive effect on skepticism. Implications are discussed for the role of social media in bringing a historically disengaged demographic into the political process.

Breaking the White‐paper Cycle: Timing Social Media to Positively Influence Your Utility's Online Reputation

Social media provides information in a timely manner with limited costs and allows open communication and comments on the information. It also allows utilities to proactively communicate with their customers and the public. Social media engagement offers many benefits, but these benefits can also be mismanaged, exposing water utilities to negative social media attention.

Age and the effects of news media attention and social media use on political interest and participation: Do social media function as leveller?

This article investigates how media use differs across age groups- and whether this matters for people’s inclination to participate politically. More specifically, the study investigates the impact of social media use for political purposes and of attention to political news in traditional media, on political interest and offline political participation. The findings, based on a four-wave panel study conducted during the 2010 Swedish national election campaign, show (1) clear differences in media use between age groups and (2) that both political social media use and attention to political news in traditional media increase political engagement over time. Thus, this study suggests that frequent social media use among young citizens can function as a leveller in terms of motivating political participation.

Did Social Media Really Matter? College Students' Use of Online Media and Political Decision Making in the 2008 Election

This study examined college students' use of online media for political purposes in the 2008 election. Social media attention, online expression, and traditional Internet attention were assessed in relation to political self-efficacy and situational political involvement. Data from a Web survey of college students showed significant positive relationships between attention to traditional Internet sources and political self-efficacy and situational political involvement. Attention to social media was not significantly related to political self-efficacy or involvement. Online expression was significantly related to situational political involvement but not political self-efficacy. Implications are discussed for political use of online media for young adults.

Day care for pre-school children.

The debate about how, where and by whom young children should be looked after is one which has occupied much social policy and media attention in recent years. Mothers undertake most of the care of young children. Internationally, out-of-home day-care provision ranges widely. These different levels of provision are not simply a response to different levels of demand for day-care, but reflect cultural and economic interests concerning the welfare of children, the need to promote mothers' participation in paid work, and the importance of socialising children into society's values. At a time when a decline in family values is held responsible for a range of social problems, the day-care debate has a special prominence. To quantify the effects of out-of-home day-care for preschool children on educational, health and welfare outcomes for children and their families. Randomised controlled trials of day-care for pre-school children were identified using electronic databases, hand searches of relevant literature, and contact with authors. Studies were included in the review if the intervention involved the provision of non-parental day care for children under 5 years of age, and the evaluation design was that of a randomised or quasi-randomised controlled trial. A total of eight trials were identified after examining 920 abstracts and 19 books. The trials were assessed for methodological quality. Day-care increases children's IQ, and has beneficial effects on behavioural development and school achievement. Long-term follow up demonstrates increased employment, lower teenage pregnancy rates, higher socio-economic status and decreased criminal behaviour. There are positive effects on mothers' education, employment and interaction with children. Effects on fathers have not been examined. Few studies look at a range of outcomes spanning the health, education and welfare domains. Most of the trials combined non-parental day-care with some element of parent training or education (mostly targeted at mothers); they did not disentangle the possible effects of these two interventions. The trials had other significant methodological weaknesses, pointing to the importance of improving on study design in this field. All the trials were carried out in the USA. Day care has beneficial effect on children's development, school success and adult life patterns. To date, all randomised trials have been conducted among disadvantaged populations in the USA. The extent to which the results are generaliseable to other cultures and socioeconomic groups has yet to be evaluated.