Multiple Social Media Platforms Research Articles

Coordinated inauthentic behavior: An innovative manipulation tactic to amplify COVID-19 anti-vaccine communication outreach via social media.

Coordinated inauthentic behavior (CIB) is a manipulative communication tactic that uses a mix of authentic, fake, and duplicated social media accounts to operate as an adversarial network (AN) across multiple social media platforms. The article aims to clarify how CIB's emerging communication tactic "secretly" exploits technology to massively harass, harm, or mislead the online debate around crucial issues for society, like the COVID-19 vaccination. CIB's manipulative operations could be one of the greatest threats to freedom of expression and democracy in our society. CIB campaigns mislead others by acting with pre-arranged exceptional similarity and "secret" operations. Previous theoretical frameworks failed to evaluate the role of CIB on vaccination attitudes and behavior. In light of recent international and interdisciplinary CIB research, this study critically analyzes the case of a COVID-19 anti-vaccine adversarial network removed from Meta at the end of 2021 for brigading. A violent and harmful attempt to tactically manipulate the COVID-19 vaccine debate in Italy, France, and Germany. The following focal issues are discussed: (1) CIB manipulative operations, (2) their extensions, and (3) challenges in CIB's identification. The article shows that CIB acts in three domains: (i) structuring inauthentic online communities, (ii) exploiting social media technology, and (iii) deceiving algorithms to extend communication outreach to unaware social media users, a matter of concern for the general audience of CIB-illiterates. Upcoming threats, open issues, and future research directions are discussed.

Pharmacy Education, Make Way for GenZ

Although our classrooms are filled with students spanning multiple generations, students entering pharmacy school are largely members of Generation Z (GenZ). To optimize pharmacy education in and outside of the classroom, we must appreciate the distinctions making GenZ unique. GenZ students want to change the world! Although much of this population is currently emerging in classrooms and careers, preliminary observations indicate they are loyal, hard-working, self-sufficient, willing to earn hierarchical advancement, and may change jobs less frequently compared with predecessors. They emerge as one of the most socially responsible generations, passionate about diversity and inclusion.1 They are more likely to choose a career path, workplace, or educational institution for reasons of social responsibility, rather than salary, compared with previous generations. They are also creative, innovative, and willing to try new things without fear of failure, including entrepreneurialism. They are financially astute and careful to make choices ensuring solid return on investment.1 Not surprisingly, most are engaged daily with multiple social media platforms. They care about their digital and social impact and focus on individuality with a desire for customization. GenZ members are uniquely equipped to adapt to today’s rapidly changing health care needs. This commentary describes attributes, needs, and perspectives of the GenZ student that must be understood by today’s pharmacy educators to assist with tailoring educational strategies. Information presented is summarized from a review of primary and periodical literature, including both research and anecdotal perspectives. We hope that this will be a starting point for further discussion within the academy.

The Influence of Social Marketing Drives on Customer Satisfaction via Demographic Variables as Moderating Factors

The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of social media marketing tactics—such as advantageous campaigns, relevant content, popular content, and presence on multiple platforms—on customer satisfaction in travel and tourism offices in Jordan. The study also explores how demographic variables like age, sex, education, and income influence this relationship. The results confirmed that social media marketing drives are positively related to customer satisfaction. The findings showed that all the drives—advantageous campaigns, relevant content, popular content, and presence on multiple social media platforms—have a significant impact on customer satisfaction. The results also suggest that demographic variables like age, sex, education, and income moderate the relationship between social media marketing drives and customer satisfaction, implying that the effect of these drives on customer satisfaction may vary based on demographic factors.

Social Media Platforms and User Engagement: A Multi-Platform Study on One-way Firm Sustainability Communication

There have been multiple research studies in recent days that have analyzed the growing role of social media in firms’ communication strategy as well as the role of social media in shaping a firm’s reputation. However, most of these studies focus on one of the multiple social media platforms that firms use. In this study, we argue that there are nuances in firms’ social media communication strategies depending on the platforms. Given the rising importance of sustainability, we focus on firms’ sustainability-related communication. We analyze the impact of firms’ one-way sustainability communication over Twitter and Facebook on the respective platforms’ user engagement. The engagement has been computed as likes and shares (likes and retweets) over the firm generated one-way sustainability communication-related posts. Using a panel dataset of a 3-year period for S&P 500 firms having active social media profiles on both platforms, we demonstrate the difference in the firms’ sustainability communication on the two platforms. We also find evidence that users on both platforms have different preferences, such as messaging from firms. Using a differential metric in our analysis helps us counter the firm-level fixed effects. We find evidence suggesting that firms would do well by having different strategies for different platforms. Firms would benefit by focusing on sustainability relevant and bite-sized content on Twitter, but more positive and engaging content on Facebook.

Explainable Misinformation Detection Across Multiple Social Media Platforms

Web Information Processing (WIP) has enormously impacted modern society since a huge percentage of the population relies on the internet to acquire information. Social Media platforms provide a channel for disseminating information and a breeding ground for spreading misinformation, creating confusion and fear among the population. One of the techniques for the detection of misinformation is machine learning-based models. However, due to the availability of multiple social media platforms, developing and training AI-based models has become a tedious job. Despite multiple efforts to develop machine learning-based methods for identifying misinformation, there has been very limited work on developing an explainable generalized detector capable of robust detection and generating explanations beyond black-box outcomes. Knowing the reasoning behind the outcomes is essential to make the detector trustworthy. Hence employing explainable AI techniques is of utmost importance. In this work, the integration of two machine learning approaches, namely domain adaptation and explainable AI, is proposed to address these two issues of generalized detection and explainability. Firstly the Domain Adversarial Neural Network (DANN) develops a generalized misinformation detector across multiple social media platforms. DANN is employed to generate the classification results for test domains with relevant but unseen data. The DANN-based model, a traditional black-box model, cannot justify and explain its outcome, i.e., the labels for the target domain. Hence a Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME) explainable AI model is applied to explain the outcome of the DANN model. To demonstrate these two approaches and their integration for effective explainable generalized detection, COVID-19 misinformation is considered a case study. We experimented with two datasets and compared results with and without DANN implementation. It is observed that using DANN significantly improves the F1 score of classification and increases the accuracy by 5% and AUC by 11%. The results show that the proposed framework performs well in the case of domain shift and can learn domain-invariant features while explaining the target labels with LIME implementation. This can enable trustworthy information processing and extraction to combat misinformation effectively.

Perception and awareness towards urolithiasis among the public at Bisha city; a cross-sectional study

Objective: This study aimed to estimate the level of awareness about urolithiasis among the Bisha population. Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted through an online questionnaire between June 2023 and July 2023 in Bisha, Saudi Arabia. The electronic questionnaire consisted of 28 questions and was distributed via multiple social media platforms. Results: A total of 1,002 participants were included with a mean age of 26.1 ± 13.9 years old. About 55% were males and 927 (92.5%) were Saudi nationals. Regarding awareness, 405 (40.4%) were in the low awareness level, 575 (57.4%) were in the medium level, and only 22 (2.2%) participants were in the high level of awareness. Also, 83 (8.3%) were hypertensive, 75 (7.5%) had hyperparathyroidism, and 69 (6.9%) were diabetic, while 634 (63.3%) had no chronic health problems. A participant with a history of renal stones was associated with a low level of awareness, and there was a negative association between age and awareness level. Moreover, most participants were aware that there was a relationship between dietary habits and renal stone formation. Conclusion: The study shows a low to medium level of awareness among study participants, especially among urolithiasis patients. In terms of risk factors, there is a low level of awareness about the family history, weight gain, and hot climate. Finally, we recommend adequate public education about urolithiasis and its risk factors.

SmartNews: An Automatic Approach for Event Detection on Media Platforms

Social Media Platforms (SMPs) are currently the leading media data sources in the world; billions of people’s electronic devices have adopted these SMPs for their use. The users ‘ accounts on these platforms generate massive amounts of data daily. Data have become an essential building block for many organizations of different domains. Recently, media organizations started using social media as a principal source to collect data, mainly news. Having recognized the importance of SMPs and data availability, media organizations are not using these data efficiently. Many media organizations still use and analyze internet data, especially from social media, manually, which leads to many disadvantages. This research proposes a more efficient and automated approach to collecting information from social media. Actually, this paper proposes an integrated framework that can extract data from multiple SMPs and merge them, store them, and finally allow media workers to extract fundamental data (events) automatically and smartly from social media. The proposed framework takes input from a query and finds the following information: top tweets, total likes and retweets on this query, user’s identity, sentiment analysis, and finally, the prediction component that can classify if a particular item has classified an event or not. An advantage of this approach is to help media leaders control and track their performance in the media sector and maintain popularity on the internet. The proposed system has been validated on real datasets collected from different data sources. Findings show that this proposed system has remarkable accuracy, precision, and recall results, after evaluating different machine learning algorithms.

The Youtube Companion to Film Education

The digital economy has expanded the global commercial sphere into portable devices for improved access to consumer data and increased trade opportunities. The proliferation of internet users across multiple social media platforms has influenced not only trade, but global media and communication. As platforms for user-generated content such as YouTube and TikTok show no signs of decelerating, the availability of digital technologies has spawned content creators worldwide. As the world’s second-most visited website, and India’s top OTT platform for media consumption, the influence of YouTube extends beyond music and entertainment. A content-sharing platform that also offers opportunities for informal learning, YouTube is causing a paradigm shift in global education including cinematic pedagogy. Based on the Jungian theory of individuation and through a schizoanalytical Deleuzian lens, this research paper examines the ubiquity of YouTube as an educational alternative among media and communication students in India. The research design will employ mixed methodologies to understand semiotic patterns in media consumption in terms of informal learning and meaning-making practices. These include descriptive analysis for individual variables and correlation analysis of variables. The research study will help determine YouTube trends in cinematic pedagogy among media and communication students in India and enable replicable analysis of informal learning paradigms facilitated by digital technologies and the concomitant consumer surplus.

Applying Behavioral Contagion Theory to Examining Young Adults’ Participation in Viral Social Media Challenges

Viral social media challenges have erupted across multiple social media platforms. While social media users participate in prosocial challenges designed to support good causes, like the Ice Bucket Challenge, some challenges (e.g., Cinnamon Challenge) can also potentially be dangerous. To understand the influential factors, experiences, and reflections of young adults who participated in a viral social media challenge in the past, we conducted interviews with 30 college students (ages 18–27). We applied behavioral contagion theory as a qualitative lens to understand whether this theory could help explain the factors that contributed to their participation. We found that behavior contagion theory was useful but not fully able to explain how and why young social media users engaged in viral challenges. Thematic analyses uncovered that overt social influence and intrinsic factors (i.e., social pressure, entertainment value, and attention-seeking) also played a key role in challenge participation. Additionally, we identified divergent patterns between prosocial and potentially risky social media challenges. Those who participated in prosocial challenges appeared to be more socially motivated as they saw more similarities between themselves and the individuals that they observed performing the challenges and were more likely to be directly encouraged by their friends to participate. In contrast, those who performed potentially risky challenges often did not see similarities with other challenge participants, nor did they receive direct encouragement from peers; yet, half of these participants said they would not have engaged in the challenge had they been more aware of the potential for physical harm. We consider the benefits and risks that viral social media challenges present for young adults with the intent of optimizing these interactions by mitigating risks, rather than discouraging them altogether.

Chinese Video Creator Identities – A Cross-Platform Social Media Perspective

Within a globalised digital environment characterised by increasingly diverse and dynamic social media platforms, video creators and their content production and circulation now typically operate across multiple social media platforms. Focusing on Chinese content creators and their cross-platform and cross-cultural social media practices, this paper draws on digital ethnographic research to analyse how user-generated content and creator identities are constructed across Chinese and Western social media services including YouTube, Bilibili, Douyin and RED. This article asks: how do Chinese content creators produce and circulate videos across multiple social media platforms and diverse cultures? How do these creators navigate platform architectures to present, manage and commercialise their identity given the cross-platform and transnational context? The findings suggest that Chinese creators’ cross-platform practices can be seen as a form of platform migration, in which they learn to move within and across platforms to ensure they create the optimal conditions for their content to spread and be viewed. These migratory platform practices are, however, constrained by audiences, algorithms, and advertiser expectations for creators to construct and maintain a single and consistent creator identity. These transnational creator identities include elements of both novelty and normativity in video content, such as niche or exotic performances, which serve up content for negotiating algorithmic visibility, or negotiating audiences for achieving a “cosmopolitan Chineseness”. As such, we can see that creator identities are both afforded and shaped through the globalised cultures, economies and politics of online video-sharing platforms.

Empowering Health Care Workers on Social Media to Bolster Trust in Science and Vaccination During the Pandemic: Making IMPACT Using a Place-Based Approach.

BackgroundGiven the widespread and concerted efforts to propagate health misinformation on social media, particularly centered around vaccination during the pandemic, many groups of clinicians and scientists were organized on social media to tackle misinformation and promote vaccination, using a national or international lens. Although documenting the impact of such social media efforts, particularly at the community level, can be challenging, a more hyperlocal or “place-based approach” for social media campaigns could be effective in tackling misinformation and improving public health outcomes at a community level.ObjectiveWe aimed to describe and document the effectiveness of a place-based strategy for a coordinated group of Chicago health care workers on social media to tackle misinformation and improve vaccination rates in the communities they serve.MethodsThe Illinois Medical Professionals Action Collaborative Team (IMPACT) was founded in March 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, with representatives from major academic teaching hospitals in Chicago (eg, University of Chicago, Northwestern University, University of Illinois, and Rush University) and community-based organizations. Through crowdsourcing on multiple social media platforms (eg, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram) with a place-based approach, IMPACT engaged grassroots networks of thousands of Illinois health care workers and the public to identify gaps, needs, and viewpoints to improve local health care delivery during the pandemic.ResultsTo address vaccine misinformation, IMPACT created 8 “myth debunking” infographics and a “vaccine information series” of 14 infographics that have generated >340,000 impressions and informed the development of vaccine education for the Chicago Public Libraries. IMPACT delivered 13 policy letters focusing on different topics, such as health care worker personal protective equipment, universal masking, and vaccination, with >4000 health care workers signatures collected through social media and delivered to policy makers; it published over 50 op-eds on COVID-19 topics in high-impact news outlets and contributed to >200 local and national news features. Using the crowdsourcing approach on IMPACT social media channels, IMPACT mobilized health care and lay volunteers to staff >400 vaccine events for >120,000 individuals, many in Chicago’s hardest-hit neighborhoods. The group’s recommendations have influenced public health awareness campaigns and initiatives, as well as research, advocacy, and policy recommendations, and they have been recognized with local and national awards.ConclusionsA coordinated group of health care workers on social media, using a hyperlocal place-based approach, can not only work together to address misinformation but also collaborate to boost vaccination rates in their surrounding communities.

Social Media Use and Health-Related Quality of Life Among Adolescents: Cross-sectional Study.

BackgroundUsing social media is a time-consuming activity of children and adolescents. Health authorities have warned that excessive use of social media can negatively affect adolescent social, physical, and psychological health. However, scientific findings regarding associations between time spent on social media and adolescent health-related quality of life (HRQoL) are not consistent. Adolescents typically use multiple social media platforms. Whether the use of multiple social media platforms impacts adolescent health is unclear.ObjectiveThe aim of this study was to examine the relationship between social media use, including the number of social media platforms used and time spent on social media, and adolescent HRQoL.MethodsWe analyzed the data of 3397 children (mean age 13.5, SD 0.4 years) from the Generation R Study, a population-based cohort study in the Netherlands. Children reported the number of social media platforms used and time spent on social media during weekdays and weekends separately. Children’s HRQoL was self-reported with the EuroQol 5-dimension questionnaire–youth version. Data on social media use and HRQoL were collected from 2015 to 2019. Multiple logistic and linear regressions were applied.ResultsIn this study, 72.6% (2466/3397) of the children used 3 or more social media platforms, and 37.7% (1234/3276) and 58.3% (1911/3277) of the children used social media at least 2 hours per day during weekdays and weekends, respectively. Children using more social media platforms (7 or more platforms) had a higher odds of reporting having some or a lot of problems on “having pain or discomfort” (OR 1.55, 95% CI 1.20 to 1.99) and “feeling worried, sad or unhappy” (OR 1.99, 95% CI 1.52 to 2.60) dimensions and reported lower self-rated health (β –3.81, 95% CI –5.54 to –2.09) compared with children who used 0 to 2 social media platforms. Both on weekdays and weekends, children spent more time on social media were more likely to report having some or a lot of problems on “doing usual activities,” “having pain or discomfort,” “feeling worried, sad or unhappy,” and report lower self-rated health (all P<.001).ConclusionsOur findings indicate that using more social media platforms and spending more time on social media were significantly related to lower HRQoL. We recommend future research to study the pathway between social media use and HRQoL among adolescents.

The effect of social media on the development of students' affective variables.

The use of social media is incomparably on the rise among students, influenced by the globalized forms of communication and the post-pandemic rush to use multiple social media platforms for education in different fields of study. Though social media has created tremendous chances for sharing ideas and emotions, the kind of social support it provides might fail to meet students’ emotional needs, or the alleged positive effects might be short-lasting. In recent years, several studies have been conducted to explore the potential effects of social media on students’ affective traits, such as stress, anxiety, depression, and so on. The present paper reviews the findings of the exemplary published works of research to shed light on the positive and negative potential effects of the massive use of social media on students’ emotional well-being. This review can be insightful for teachers who tend to take the potential psychological effects of social media for granted. They may want to know more about the actual effects of the over-reliance on and the excessive (and actually obsessive) use of social media on students’ developing certain images of self and certain emotions which are not necessarily positive. There will be implications for pre- and in-service teacher training and professional development programs and all those involved in student affairs.

A MULTI-PLATFORM APPROACH USING HYBRID DEEP LEARNING MODELS FOR AUTOMATIC DETECTION OF HATE SPEECH ON SOCIAL MEDIA

Hate speech on online social networks is a general problem across social media platforms that has the potential of causing physical harm to the society. The growing number of hateful comments on the Internet and the rate at which tweets and posts are published per second on social media make it a challenging task to manually identify and remove the hateful commentsfrom such posts. Although numerous publications have proposed machine learning approaches to detect hate speech and other antisocial online behaviours without concentrating on blocking the hate speech from being published on social media. Similarly, prior publications on deep learning and multi-platform approaches did not work on the topic of detecting hate speech in Englishlanguage comments on Twitter and Facebook. This paper proposed a deep learning approach based on a hybrid of convolutional neural network (CNN) and long short-term memory (LSTM) with pre-trained GloVe words embedding to automatically detect and block hate speech on multiple social media platforms including Twitter and Facebook. Thus, datasets were collected from Twitter and Facebook which were annotated as hateful and non-hateful. A set of features were extracted from the datasets based on word embedding mechanism, and the word embeddings were fed into our deep learning framework. The experiment was carried out as a three independent tasks approach. The results show that our hybrid CNN-LSTM approach in Task 1 achieved an f1-score of 0.91, Task 2 obtained an f1-score of 0.92, and Task 3 achieved an f1-score of 0.87. Thus, there is outstanding performance in classifying text as Hate speech or non-hate speech in all the considered metrics. Based on the findings, we conclude that hatespeech can be detected and blocked on social media before it can reach the public.

Use of social media as a marketing and information provision tool by the City of Cape Town Libraries

Background: Social media use by libraries has facilitated communication and marketing of services to user communities. The City of Cape Town Libraries adopted social media usage in the 2015–2016 financial year. This study is set out to assess librarians’ perception and response to the implementation and adoption of social media for library services.Objectives: The research sought to appraise the City of Cape Town public librarians’ experiences of social media use in the provision of information services, evaluate librarians’ perceptions of social media use for information provision services and recommend ways in which social media information services provision can be improved upon.Method: A quantitative research method and a descriptive survey research design approach was adopted for the study, and a web-based questionnaire was used for data collection. The study was anchored on the technological acceptance model, and employed total enumeration sampling to collect data from the 102 City of Cape Town librarians-in-charge.Results: City of Cape Town librarians have positive perception and acceptance towards the use of social media to perform library-related duties. Librarians utilised social media in engaging with library users, including marketing of library services, and promotion of library events. Experiences including lack of guidance in dealing with copyright issues and organisational policy favouring a single social media platform were reported.Conclusion: Library services through is vastly positive but expansion across multiple social media platforms is necessary to encourage further engagement with users. A third construct: preference of choice is proposed for the TAM model.

Systematic Bias in Self-Reported Social Media Use in the Age of Platform Swinging: Implications for Studying Social Media Use in Relation to Adolescent Health Behavior.

Public health researchers are increasingly interested in the potential relationships between social media (SM) use, well-being, and health behavior among adolescents. However, most research has assessed daily SM time via self-report survey questions, despite a lack of clarity around the accuracy of such reports given the current tendency of youth to access SM on multiple electronic devices and cycle between multiple SM platforms on a daily basis (i.e., platform swinging). The current study investigates the potential for systematic reporting biases to skew findings. Three hundred and twenty incoming college students downloaded software on their computers, tablets, and smartphones to track their active use of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat over a 2-week surveillance period and then self-reported their average daily minutes on each platform immediately after. Larger proportions of students over-estimated than under-estimated their use, with the largest overestimations found on the most heavily used platforms. Females logged significantly more SM time and were less accurate in reporting than were males and, independently, the likelihood of substantial inaccuracies in reporting total SM time and time on most individual platforms increased with each additional SM platform participants reported using. Findings demonstrate that self-reported estimates of SM time among adolescents in the age of SM platform swinging are prone to substantial error and may lead to biased conclusions about relationships between variables. Alternative measurement approaches are suggested to improve the validity of future research in this area.

Measuring the performances of politicians on social media and the correlation with major Latin American election results

Contemporary social media (SM) has strongly impacted democratic practices. The success of presidential campaigns is frequently attributed to being highly correlated with the candidates' social media performance, but there is no well-established method to measure this performance. Thus, this study aims to improve the understanding of a politician's performance on SM and its correlation with electoral results. Applying a new, recently-defined set of metrics, based on Zajonc's exposition theory and considering the interactions of users on politicians' profiles in multiple SM platforms, this research identifies statistical correlations between SM performance and the votes received in multiple elections. As case studies, this paper focuses on the most recent presidential elections in the four most populous countries in Latin America: Argentina (2019), Brazil (2018), Colombia (2018), and Mexico (2018). Data from more than 65,000 posts were collected from the SM profiles of the main candidates on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, starting from 300 days before the election days, and correlations with electoral results were calculated. The results demonstrated strong correlations between the defined metrics and the votes received, particularly the engagement per post, although there were differences among countries. On the other hand, we observed that there is zero or negative correlation between the number of posts and the electoral results.

Brand post popularity on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn: the case of start-ups

PurposeWith the growing trend of omni-channel marketing, brands are increasingly looking to offer a seamless experience to their online fan base by connecting with them across multiple social media platforms. This paper explores the relationship between brand posts' characteristics and popularity for start-ups across four different social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.Design/methodology/approachA total of 1,200 social media posts from 10 start-ups were subjected to content analysis. Regression analysis was employed with brand posts' popularity (likes, comments and shares/retweets) as the dependent variable.FindingsThe results reveal several nuances in brand post popularity for start-ups across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. Antecedents of the popularity measures of likes, comments and shares/retweets also fared differently.Originality/valueThe paper reports one of the earliest empirical studies to better understand how the qualities of brand posts are related to their appeal across multiple social media platforms. It advances the literature on social media marketing and offers insights to social media managers of brands, particularly start-ups, on how to offer smoother customer journeys across numerous digital touchpoints.

Cognitive Determinants of Health Information Seeking Behavior through Social Media Platforms among Malaysian Adults

Introduction: Health information-seeking behaviour is a process of gathering information for individuals to understand and cope with his/her health problems. Apart from the Internet or Web 1.0, Web 2.0 tools has been increasingly used as alternative to seek health information and one such tool is social media platform. This study aims to identify cognitive determinants of health information-seeking behaviour through social media platforms among Malaysian adults. Methods: A cross-sectional study by means of convenience sampling was conducted during a nationwide pandemic lockdown. Cognitive determinants were defined as respondent’s perceived usefulness, perceived ease of user, perceived benefit, perceived costs, perceived behavioural control, and perceived risk towards social media use. Questionnaires were distributed via Google Form link to multiple social media platforms and cross-platform messaging app. Differences between group of sociodemographic factors and other independent variables were tested with nonparametric tests while multiple linear regression was employed to determine the significant predictors of the health information seeking behavior. Results: A total of 705 individuals responded to the survey invitation, the majority of which were females (65%), Malay (93.6%), married (52.1%), and received tertiary education (88.5%). Multiple linear regression analysis showed that perceived benefit (β= 0.612, 95% CI: 0.517-0.708, p&lt;0.001), perceived usefulness (β= 0.653, 95% CI: 0.453-0.853, p&lt;0.001), and perceived risk (β= 0.131, 95% CI: 0.03-0.259, p=0.044) significantly predict health information seeking behavior through social media platform. Conclusion: Our findings provide fundamental grounds for stakeholders to better understand and influence online behavior. Staying abreast of the current online trend is crucial as more people have begun to rely on social media for health information.

Prevalence and Associated Factors of Mask-Induced Acne (Maskne) in the General Population of Jeddah During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Background: COVID-19 is a newly emerged coronavirus (SARS-CoV2) infectious disease pandemic that originated in Wuhan, China at the end of 2019. The first documented case in Saudi Arabia was on March 2, 2020. Soon after, the World Health Organization declared the outbreak a global pandemic. The ministry of health in Saudi Arabia mandated the wearing of facial masks for the general population, among other methods of protection from the spread of this highly contagious virus.It was observed that the continuous and prolonged wearing of facial masks has led to the development of multiple skin complications and facial dermatosis, including new-onset acne as well as flares of pre-existing acne in the general population and especially healthcare workers.Methodology: This cross-sectional study was conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic from January to September 2021 in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. A self-administered electronic survey was distributed to residents of Jeddah city using multiple social media platforms to assess the prevalence and the factors attributed to the development of mask-induced acne.Result: A total of 630 participants were enrolled. 470 (74.6%) were females and 160 (25.4%) were males, and the predominant age group was 18-30 years old, 374 (59.4%). The majority of participants wore a mask for five to seven days per week, 272 (43.2%), and for less than four hours per day, 378 (60%). The surgical masks were the most frequently used masks, with 597 (94.8%). Three hundred and seventy-nine (60.2%) participants had no previous skin disease on their faces. Only 251 (39.8%) of the participants had pre-existing skin diseases affecting the face. Of those, acne was the most frequent skin condition, 217 (86.4%), followed by atopic dermatitis, 12 (4.8%).Ninety-seven (23.5%) participants without a prior history of acne reported the new onset of acne during the pandemic with the use of a face mask or face shield. Thirty people (59.9%) who had acne on their faces before the pandemic said that their acne got worse when they wore face masks or face shields for a long time during the pandemic.Conclusion: This study demonstrated a significant association between the new onset of acne or worsening of pre-existing acne and the frequent and prolonged usage of facial masks. Thus, certain measures should be applied to prevent the development of new or worsening of prior acne while maintaining effective protection using facial masks.