Online Social Networking Sites Research Articles

Creative webs: decoding the creativity potential of Twitter followers.

Previous studies have associated creativity to one's social networks. This study builds on this framework and examines the premise that one's social fabric is a catalyst for creativity, specifically probing the dynamics between online social connections and creative expressions in the realm of Esports. Therefore, this research paper examined a correlation between people's creativity and their Effective Network Size (non-redundant ties) on Twitter, to see if potentially non-redundant information is related to creativity. Creativity score was defined as the propensity of a participant to utilize specific terms relating to Esports in its emerging stages, prior to its peak popularity as evidenced by Google Trends. Effective Network Size was analyzed based on the social ties of participants on Twitter (N = 50,000). The findings indicate that the higher the Effective Network Size score, the higher the creativity score. Furthermore, geographically dispersed social networks moderated the relationship between Effective Network Size and creativity. For people with more dispersed social networks, ENS was more constructive for creativity. These findings are discussed in the broader context of the relevancy of online social networking sites for creativity.

IJCM_184A: A Study on Impact of Addiction to Social Networking Sites on Psychological Well Being of Undergraduate Medical Students of GMC, Siddipet

Background: India is the third largest country to use social networking sites. A social networking site is a website where a user can create a profile and build a personal network that connects him/her to other users. Social networking sites are increasingly affecting the psychological health of teenagers and young adults and so found that addiction to online social networking sites has several psychiatric disorders, including depressive symptoms, anxiety, and low self-esteem. Objectives: To find out the addiction to social networking sites and assess the psychological well-being of undergraduate medical students of GMC, Siddipet Methodology: A cross-sectional study is being conducted in the Government medical college, Siddipet for two months among undergraduate medical students by universal sampling. The self-administered, pre-validated questionnaire, using Ryff’s scale and Bergan scale, for psychological well- being and social networking site addiction respectively. Descriptive and inferential statistics were done in SPSS using appropriate statistical analysis. Results: A total of 806 students of various years of MBBS participated in the study, Males were 301 and females were 505 Among them, out of the total 806 students studied, the psychological well-being was found to be low in 6(0.74%) and moderate in 597(74.07%). In the present study, out of the total 806 medical students studied, 148(18.36%) were found to have social networking site addiction, out of which males were 52(35.13%) and females were 96(64.86%). Out of 148 medical students who were found to have social networking site addiction, psychological well-being was found to be low in 4(2.70%) and moderate in 111(75%) and the p value was found to be statistically significant at 0.007. When the psychological well-being was compared in students between those who had social networking site addiction and those who didn’t had social networking site addiction, psychological well-being was comparatively less (0.74% vs 2.70% in Low psychological well-being and (75% vs 74.07%) and the difference was found to be statistically significant (p value = 0.007). Conclusion: A significant percentage of medical students (18.36%) were found to have addiction to social networking sites in our study because of the widespread availability of gadgets. Psychological well-being was found to be comparatively less in students who had social networking site addiction compared to those who didn’t had the addiction.

Social Media Marketing's Effect on Small and Medium-Sized Businesses' Performance

Social media is increasingly being included into the marketing plans of many micro and small enterprises as a useful tool for connecting with a sizable collection of prospective buyers in ways that enable individuals to impart knowledge in a natural conversation. Despite the fact that historically, marketers have put all of their efforts into getting the best possible placement in the market. The best chance for micro and small enterprises may arise in this area as individuals may begin to view social media platforms as their primary source of all information over time. The purpose of this paper is to comprehend how well internet media works to promote shopping websites that have an impact on consumer purchasing decisions. With the rise in popularity of Websites like ‘Twitter’, ‘Facebook’, ‘LinkedIn’, and ‘YouTube’, Social Media Marketing has grown increasingly widespread. Marketing carried out on social media platforms or online social networking sites is referred to as social media marketing. The majority of businesses and organisations have their own websites; however, it might be challenging to reach individuals who are unaware of the organisation. As a result, many businesses have found it beneficial to have online profiles on sites. The goal of this study is to develop practical recommendations and offer strategic insights to help consumer brands use social media more effectively. In addition, it was discovered that social media platforms and the businesses themselves played a significant role in affecting engagement levels, suggesting that there is no single recipe for successful social media management.

Impact of Electronic Word of Mouth on Purchase Intention: Mediating Role of Brand Trust and Product Involvement

Word-of-mouth (WOM) has been recognized as one of the most influential tools of transmitting the information. With the technology-oriented advancements and the emergence of various online social networking sites (SNS) like Face book, Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Twitter, the concept of word of mouth has been revived to the electronic word-of-mouth. This spectacle has an enormous influence on the decisions of the consumers they make while purchasing a product or brand. Drawing on the theory of planned behavior, this study examined the influence of electronic word-of-mouth on purchase intention with the explanatory role of the brand trust and product involvement. In this quantitative study the empirical data has been collected through survey questionnaires. For this research the target population was the students of different universities of Lahore who use social networking platforms to read the online reviews and recommendations. Measurement items were adopted from previous studies in marketing literature. To test hypotheses, linear and hierarchal regression techniques have been applied. All the tests on the data to infer results were performed through SPSS version 22.0. The results indicate that product involvement and brand trust positively and partially mediate the relationship between electronic word-of-mouth and purchase intention. This paper endorsed the importance of electronic word-of-mouth, brand trust, product involvement, and this information will assist the marketers in making the efficient and low budgeted marketing strategies in future to boost up the purchase intention of the consumers that will ultimately leads to earn higher profits. The theoretical and practical implications are also discussed.

A dual-process model to explain self-disclosure on online social networking sites: examining the moderating effect of enjoyment

PurposeResearchers continue to address the concept of self-disclosure because it is foundational for helping social networking sites (SNS) function and thrive. Nevertheless, the authors' literature review indicates that uncertainty remains around the underlying mechanisms and factors involved in the self-disclosure process. The purpose of this research is to better understand the self-disclosure process from the lens of dual-process theory (DPT). The authors consider both the controlled factors (i.e. self-presentation and reciprocity) and an automatic factor (i.e. social influence to use an SNS) involved in self-disclosure and broaden The authors proposed a model to include the interactive facets of enjoyment.Design/methodology/approachThe proposed model was empirically validated by conducting a survey among users of WeChat Moments in China.FindingsAs hypothesized, this research confirms that enjoyment and automatic processing (i.e. social influence to use an SNS) are complementary in the SNS self-disclosure process and enjoyment negatively moderates the positive relationship between controlled factor (i.e. self-presentation) and self-disclosure.Originality/valueTheoretically, this study offers a new perspective on explaining SNS self-disclosure by adopting DPT. Specifically, this study contributes to the extant SNS research by applying DPT to examine how the controlled factors and the automatic factor shape self-disclosure processes and how enjoyment influences vary across these processes – enriching knowledge about SNS self-disclosure behaviors. Practically, the authors provide important design guidelines to practitioners concerning devising mechanisms to foster more automatic-enjoyable value-added functions to improve SNS users' participation and engagement.

‘Instant Noodle Crisis’: understanding tourist and public sentiments towards collective tourist environmentally irresponsible behaviour in a tourist destination in China

ABSTRACT Limited studies have examined tourist and public sentiments towards tourists’ environmentally irresponsible behaviour. This study used Python to mine and analyze online reviews from online travel agency websites and social networking sites to comprehend a specific event of tourists’ environmentally irresponsible behaviour, the Laojun Mountain ‘Instant Noodle Crisis’ in China, which has triggered widespread online discussion. The findings are as follows: (1) Based on the event system theory, it showed that the evolutionary mechanisms of ‘Instant Noodle Crisis’ differ between online travel agency websites and social networking sites. (2) The results from keywords, semantic co-occurrence, and visual semantic association networks revealed that reviews on online travel agency websites focused on travel experiences and sights, with tourists rarely mentioned their own behaviour. In contrast, reviews on social networking sites concentrated on blame-assigning and cause-seeking. (3) Latent Dirichlet Allocations model analysis demonstrated that tourists’ environmentally irresponsible behaviour decreased positive feelings and increased negative emotions among tourists and the public. This study explored the occurrence mechanisms, tourist and public attitudes and emotions, related to collective tourists’ environmentally irresponsible behaviour from a novel perspective. It offer insights for future academic research in the field and tourism destination management strategies.

A Hybrid Probabilistic Privacy Preserving Based Community Detection Model on Online Social Networking Data

Privacy preserving plays a vital role on the online social networking sites due to high dimensionality and data size. Community detection is used to find the social relationships among the node edges and links. However, most of the conventional models are difficult to process the community structure detection due to high computational time and memory. Also, these models require contextual weighted nodes information for privacy preserving process. In order to overcome these issues, an advanced probabilistic weighted based community detection and privacy preserving framework is developed on the large social networking data. In this model, a filter based probabilistic model is developed to remove the sparse values and to find the weighted community detection nodes and its profiles for privacy preserving process. Experimental results show that the filter based probabilistic community detection framework has better efficiency in terms of normalized mutual information, Q, rand index and runtime (ms).

Enhanced Spam Detection System for Twitter Social Networking Platform

Twitter social site is one of the most popular Online Social Networking Site (OSN) used by popular people such as Ministers, businessman, large companies, actors to share their information. In this site, around 500 million of tweets are posted monthly by the total 313 million Twitter active users. The widespread of Twitter has drawn the interest of spammers. These malicious actors exploit the platform for various nefarious purposes, including monitoring authentic users, disseminating harmful software, and promoting their agendas through URLs embedded in tweets. They engage in tactics like secret following and unfollowing legitimate users, all with the intent of gathering sensitive information.To resolve this problem, a secure spam detection based on machine learning approach is designed. The designed used stop word removal, word to vector model to refined and dimensionally reduced the data. To enhance the quality of the data Cosine similarity is also been applied to measure the similarity score among the tweets and based upon that Artificial Neural Network (ANN) is trained. Later on, it is used to test the efficiency by examining the performance parameters in terms of precision, recall and F-measure. Also, the comparative analysis has been performed to present the efficiency of the work. The average precision, recall and F measure of proposed spam detection model of 0.9252, 0.6107 and 0.734 are obtained.

Time in a Virtual World: Facebook Intrusion, Time Perspective, and Contents of Facebook Narratives

Online social networking sites are places where users spend a lot of their time and leave a huge number of narratives. In the virtual world of Facebook, moving in a space is limited to only a slight hand movement. The aim of this study was to examine the relationship between the level of Facebook intrusion, time perspective, and the contents of Facebook narratives. The participants were 83 Polish Facebook users, aged 18 to 62 years. We used the Facebook Intrusion Questionnaire, the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory, and the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count program. The results suggest that Facebook intrusion is connected with the low future perspective of Facebook users. Moreover, the stronger the Facebook intrusion, the more swear words in Facebook narratives. There were significant positive relationships between a present fatalistic time perspective and words expressing aggression in Facebook narratives. The results were interpreted in the context of the theory of embodied cognition.

TOWARD PSYCHOINFORMATICS: COMPUTER SCIENCE MEETS PSYCHOLOGY

Psycoinformatics is a present paper that provides insight into emerging research. This also emphasize the cooperation between the disciplines of psychology and computer science by handling large data sets derived from heavy used device, as smartphones or online social networking sites, to shed light on a large number of psychological traits, including personality and mood. New challenges are waiting for the psychologists in light which result in “Big Data” sets, because classic psychological methods will only be able to analyse the data derived from ubiquitous mobile devices, as well as other everyday technologies. As a result, psychologists must enrich their scientific methods through the inclusion of methods from informatics. The paper provides a clear view of one area of this research field, dealing mainly with social networks and smartphones. Additionally, we also highlight how data derived from Psychoinformatics can be in a meaningful way with data from human by neuroscience. We close the paper with some observations of areas for future research and problems that require consideration within this new discipline. KEYWORDS: Psycoinformatics, humans, computer, researchers, neuroscience.

Social Networking Site Use, Personality, User Habit, and Subjective Wellbeing: A Kazakhstani Pilot Study

Considering the prevalence and increased use of online social networking sites (SNSs), the present study investigated the association between visiting SNSs and users’ subjective wellbeing. Data were collected from 251 participants and were analyzed using partial least square-based structural equation modeling. The findings showed that there was no significant direct influence of SNS use on users’ subjective wellbeing. Additionally, the study found a significant mediating influence of passion on the association between SNS visits and subjective wellbeing. Moreover, the study did not find any significant negative mediating impact of obsession with SNS visits and association with subjective wellbeing. Among various personality traits, openness to experience had a positive moderating impact and neuroticism had a negative moderating impact on the association between SNS visits and subjective wellbeing among SNS users. The study provides implications for managers and parents regarding improved SNS use and increased subjective wellbeing.

Chronic Diseases and Sociodemographic Characteristics Associated With Online Health Information Seeking and Using Social Networking Sites: Nationally Representative Cross-sectional Survey in Japan.

In an aging society, worsening chronic diseases increase the burden on patients and the health care system. Using online health information including health information via social networking sites (SNSs), such as Facebook and YouTube, may play an important role in the self-management of chronic diseases and health promotion for internet users. This study aims to improve strategies for promoting access to reliable information for the self-management of chronic diseases via the internet, and to identify populations facing barriers to using the internet for health, we examined chronic diseases and characteristics associated with online health information seeking and the use of SNSs. This study used data from the INFORM Study 2020, which was a nationally representative cross-sectional postal mail survey conducted using a self-administered questionnaire in 2020. The dependent variables were online health information seeking and SNS use. Online health information seeking was assessed using 1 question about whether respondents used the internet to find health or medical information. SNS use was assessed by inquiring about the following 4 aspects: visiting SNSs, sharing health information on SNSs, writing in an online diary or blog, and watching a health-related video on YouTube. The independent variables were 8 chronic diseases. Other independent variables were sex, age, education status, work, marital status, household income, health literacy, and self-reported health status. We conducted a multivariable logistic regression model adjusted for all independent variables to examine the associations of chronic diseases and other variables with online health information seeking and SNS use. The final sample for analysis comprised 2481 internet users. Hypertension or high blood pressure, chronic lung diseases, depression or anxiety disorder, and cancer were reported by 24.5%, 10.1%, 7.7%, and 7.2% of respondents, respectively. The odds ratio of online health information seeking among respondents with cancer was 2.19 (95% CI 1.47-3.27) compared with that among those without cancer, and the odds ratio among those with depression or anxiety disorder was 2.27 (95% CI 1.46-3.53) compared with that among those without. Further, the odds ratio for watching a health-related YouTube video among those with chronic lung diseases was 1.42 (95% CI 1.05-1.93) compared with that among those without these diseases. Women, younger age, higher level of education, and high health literacy were positively associated with online health information seeking and SNS use. For patients with cancer, strategies for promoting access to websites with reliable cancer-related information as well as access among patients with chronic lung diseases to YouTube videos providing reliable information may be beneficial for the management of these diseases. Moreover, it is important to improve the online environment to encourage men, older adults, internet users with lower education levels, and those with low health literacy to access online health information.

The current shapes of cyberviolence in digital relationships

AbstractSocial life has moved toward the digital world in many aspects. As the original inhabitants of virtual life, young people face several adversities while flirting and dating online. The anonymity of the online environment enables aggression without consequences. Cyberviolence has no boundaries as time or place. Thus it may cause psychological distress.Young people frequently use online dating and social networking sites, which makes them vulnerable to cyber dating violence, sextortion, and revenge porn. Cyberdating violence usually targets young women and girls. It is mainly related to stereotypical gender beliefs: presented as controlling behavior and psychological violence. Survivors of cyber dating violence tend to feel anger, hostility, and loneliness. Sextortion is image-based sexual abuse, which includes threats with intimate pictures or videos. Perpetrators of sextortion can be hackers, ex-partners, or admirers. Exposure to sextortion is related to shame, fear, and helplessness. Former partners may use revenge porn to control one’s behavior. It is another kind of image-based sexual abuse. Perpetrators may use nonconsensual pornography to punish or humiliate their ex-partners.Cyber victimization is as traumatic as real-life victimization. That results in depression, anxiety, and posttraumatic stress. Moreover, the absence of time and space restrictions can make cyberviolence even more debilitative. I aim to inform European psychiatrists about the current shapes of cyber psychological trauma in the context of online flirting and dating. So that psychiatrists can better understand its content and outcomes, especially while working with young people.Disclosure of InterestNone Declared

Online Social Support and Trait Anxiety and Phubbing in Nurses

IntroductionPhubbing with smartphones becoming an integral part of life and sociotelism behavior has emerged as an important academic concern (Chotpitayasunondh et al.,CHB,2016; 63, 9-18). Expectation of social support in social networks: It can be defined as “When the individual is emotionally intense, he/she shares about this situation and emotions and expects to be paid attention to, sincere and friendly approach from the people on social networking sites, and hopes that an environment of support and trust will be created with social networks by seeing that he/she is not alone with more emotional support.” (Uzakgiden et. al., JASR 2019;2 20-24)In the nursing profession, in addition to using the internet for professional requirements, being a member of online social networking sites and spending time on these platforms are increasing.It is important to know the status of phubbing, which damages face-to-face communication understand its effect on patient-nurse communication and nurses communication within the team. Due to the intensity of work life in the nursing profession and the length of hours spent at work, the effort to meet the need for social support virtually may increase phubbing behavior.ObjectivesThe aim of this study was to examine the relationship among phubbing, online social support and trait anxiety, and the related factors in nurses.MethodsThe population of the research consists of nurses who actively use their social media accounts. Nurses were accessed by snowball method on online Whatsapp groups, Instagram and Facebook platforms through a digital survey between May and November 2021. Data collected by using an individual descriptive characteristics form, generic scale of phubbing, online social support scale, trait anxiety inventory. Mann-Whitney U, Kruskal-Wallis H tests, t-test and pearson correlation coefficient was used for data analysis.ResultsThe phubbing scores of the nurses ranged from 15 to 98; the trait anxiety levels of the nurses were at a moderate level. It was observed that marital status, presence of WhatsApp groups with teammates, and being warned about the frequency of phone use from teammates was related to phubbingg (p<0.001). There was a positive moderate correlation between the phubbing score and the online social support score; a weak positive correlation was found between the general phubbing score and the trait anxiety score.ConclusionsIt was determined that social support from social media significantly affected the phubbing behavior of nurses and that trait anxiety mediated this relationship. In future studies, researchers can conduct extensive research on the effect of sociotelism on nurse-patient communication and care. This study was also important in terms of making significant contributions to the literature, where there are only a limited number of studies on phubbing.Disclosure of InterestNone Declared

Threats Targeting Children on Online Social Networks

Today, practically everyone has access to the internet and owns some type of digital gadgets, such as a smartphone, laptop, tablet, etc. We live in a digital world where internet use is widespread. Nowadays, a growing number of children have access to the internet via portable electronic devices such as tablets, laptops, and gaming consoles. Online social networks (OSN) have become increasingly popular and are now widely used along with the rise of the internet. A large percentage of children worldwide have profiles on at least one online social networking site. Children register on these platforms so they can communicate with their peers, make new friends, share their interests and hobbies in the hopes of meeting someone who has similar ones, play games, and more. But in addition to the benefits and enjoyment that kids derive from social networks, there are also risks and dangers that specifically target children on OSN platforms. Online harassment, online predators, sexual solicitation, cyberbullying, and cyber grooming are all threats that target children on OSNs. This paper aims to bring awareness to parents and children about the potential dangers present on online social networking platforms and offers guidelines on how to better protect children in the social networking environment.

“Horizontal” Two-Step Flow: The Role of Opinion Leaders in Directing Attention to Social Movements in Decentralized Information Environments

ABSTRACT The increasing ubiquity of online social networking sites has brought with it questions as to whether old models of communication flows—specifically, the two-step flow model—have potential explanatory power in an era when individuals can follow politicians, celebrities, and other opinion leaders. We expand research using two-step flow to explain attention in the new media ecology by accounting for what we term horizontal two-step flow, wherein non-media actors leverage the influence of online opinion leaders, who may include traditional news media actors, to attract attention to their messages. Using the political fight over repeal of the Eighth Amendment of the Irish Constitution, we examine engagement with communication messages from pro- and anti-repeal organizations in the country, demonstrating that the horizontal two-step flow model of communication explains attention to social movement organizations. In particular, we find that opinion leaders—those with high social influence on Twitter, either via verified status or high degree centrality—increase the diffusion of social movement messages beyond movements’ social media follower bases.

On limitations of uniplex networks for modeling multiplex contagion.

Many network contagion processes are inherently multiplex in nature, yet are often reduced to processes on uniplex networks in analytic practice. We therefore examine how data modeling choices can affect the predictions of contagion processes. We demonstrate that multiplex contagion processes are not simply the union of contagion processes over their constituent uniplex networks. We use multiplex network data from two different contexts-(1) a behavioral network to represent their potential for infectious disease transmission using a "simple" epidemiological model, and (2) users from online social network sites to represent their potential for information spread using a threshold-based "complex" contagion process. Our results show that contagion on multiplex data is not captured accurately in models developed from the uniplex networks even when they are combined, and that the nature of the differences between the (combined) uniplex and multiplex results depends on the specific spreading process over these networks.

Social Media Role and Its Impact on Public Health: A Narrative Review.

Social mediarefers to online social networking sites and is a broad example of Web 2.0, such as Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, Reddit, Instagram, WhatsApp, and blogs.It is a new and ever-changing field. Access to the internet, social media platformsand mobile communications are all tools that can be leveraged to make health information available and accessible. This research aimed to conduct an introductory study of the existing published literature on why to choose and how to usesocial media to obtain population health information and to gain knowledge about various health sectors like disease surveillance, health education, health research, health and behavioral modification, influence policy, enhance professional development and doctor-patient relation development. We searched for publications using databases like PubMed, NCBI, and Google Scholar, and combined 2022 social media usage statistics from PWC, Infographics Archive, and Statista online websites. The American Medical Association(AMA) policy about Professionalism in Social Media Use, American College of Physicians-Federations of State Medical Boards(ACP-FSMB) guidelines for Online Medical Professionalism, andHealth Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) social media violations were also briefly reviewed.Our findings reflect the benefits and drawbacks of using web platforms and how they impactpublic healthethically, professionally, and socially.During our research, we discovered that social media's impact on public health concerns is both positive and negative, and we attempted to explain how social networks are assisting people in achieving health, which is still a source of much debate.

Enhanced Clustering Based OSN Privacy Preservation to Ensure k-Anonymity, t-Closeness, l-Diversity, and Balanced Privacy Utility

Online Social Networks (OSN) sites allow end-users to share a great deal of information, which may also contain sensitive information, that may be subject to commercial or non-commercial privacy attacks. As a result, guaranteeing various levels of privacy is critical while publishing data by OSNs. The clustering-based solutions proved an effective mechanism to achieve the privacy notions in OSNs. But fixed clustering limits the performance and scalability. Data utility degrades with increased privacy, so balancing the privacy utility trade-off is an open research issue. The research has proposed a novel privacy preservation model using the enhanced clustering mechanism to overcome this issue. The proposed model includes phases like pre-processing, enhanced clustering, and ensuring privacy preservation. The enhanced clustering algorithm is the second phase where authors modified the existing fixed k-means clustering using the threshold approach. The threshold value is determined based on the supplied OSN data of edges, nodes, and user attributes. Clusters are k-anonymized with multiple graph properties by a novel one-pass algorithm. After achieving the k-anonymity of clusters, optimization was performed to achieve all privacy models, such as k-anonymity, t-closeness, and l-diversity. The proposed privacy framework achieves privacy of all three network components, i.e., link, node, and user attributes, with improved utility. The authors compare the proposed technique to underlying methods using OSN Yelp and Facebook datasets. The proposed approach outperformed the underlying state of art methods for Degree of Anonymization, computational efficiency, and information loss.

A 1-Gram Sentiment Analysis Algorithm for Detecting Cyberbullying in Online Social Networks

Online social networking (OSN) sites in addition to providing business and recreational opportunities are fast becoming a breeding ground for cyberbullying activities. Cyberbullying is an act of harassing or insulting a person by sending messages that are hurting or threatening in nature using electronic communication. Such messages include threats, harassment, and humiliating messages to victims. Other forms are sexual harassments, sexual predating, etc. Cyberbullying poses threat to the physical and mental health of the victims. In this study, sentiments analysis was used to computationally recognize and categorize the opinions, views, and ideas expressed in a piece of text in social media to determine and establish whether the writer's attitude towards a particular topic, person, or a product is positive or negative. The study adopted both quantitative and qualitative approaches. Posts from Facebook were collected and analyzed. The software developed during the research was able detect the presence of cyberbullying in user contents. Results showed promising ability of the software to detect and suspend cyberbullying contents.