Posts In Threads Research Articles

‘Nothing Can Stop What’s Coming’: An analysis of the conspiracy theory discourse on 4chan’s /Pol board

This article presents evidence of a conspiracy theory discourse on the anonymous messaging board 4chan, specifically /pol as in politically incorrect. Previous research shows 4chan lacks a coherent political discourse. Recent research suggests that the site is at least a reliable source of white supremacism within a larger framework of conspiratorial thinking. Grounded theory guides a systematic analysis of posts from 4chan’s /pol board during the dates third to ninth January 2021, before and after the attempted insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Following Trump’s call to supporters to Stop the Steal (referring to unsubstantiated claims of a fraudulent 2020 election), the search terms steal and Trump collected all posts in threads with matching posts. A critical discourse analysis investigates the presence and articulation of conspiracism in selected posts. Findings reveal confirmation with previous research about the apparent lack of ideological coherence on/pol yet also affirms the discourse of white supremacism. Additionally, a diversity of conspiracism functions as a primary form of communication on 4chan regardless of one’s loyalty to a particular political ideology.

Patient Perspectives on the Appropriate Use of Prescribed Opioids in Chronic Non-Malignant Pain: Analysis of Online Forums Using Theoretical Domains Framework.

PurposeIn view of concerns about the harmful effects of long-term use and patient misuse of opioids in chronic non-malignant pain, this study provides insight into patients’ perspectives on their experience of living with chronic non-malignant pain (CNMP), prescribed opioid use, and optimisation.Patients and MethodsData were collected from active UK-based CNMP specific or general health forums that do not require registration, with more than 100 members. English written thread posts between 2016 and 2020 were systematically searched from the forum search bar using different keywords and then analysed using the Theoretical Domains Framework (TDF).ResultsFindings showed that chronic pain is a dominant, life-altering experience with physical, psychological and social impact. Findings highlighted that opioid optimisation is facilitated by patients’ knowledge and understanding, practical coping strategies and supportive relationships with healthcare providers and others in their surroundings. The study found that barriers to opioid optimisation included lack of availability of alternatives, difficulties accessing health services and broken relationships with clinicians.ConclusionAnalysis of CNMP patients’ posts on online forums highlighted the devastating impact of pain on social functioning, relationships and mental health. Patients emerged as knowledge seekers prepared to engage in opioid optimisation.

Fentanyl analogs on the Swedish webforum flashback: Interest and impact of scheduling

BackgroundSweden regulates new psychoactive substances, including fentanyl analogs, individually. This reactive scheduling procedure enabled the existence of a recreational market for unscheduled fentanyl analogs sold from surface webshops. We measure the interest in 24 named fentanyl analogs and the impact of scheduling. MethodsWe scraped posts in threads on named fentanyl analogs from the Swedish internet forum Flashback.org, 2012–2019. The sample consists of 24 threads with a total of 8761 posts. We construct five measures of interest based on duration of threads, number of posts, and number of distinct posters, and fit a non-seasonal ARMA model to test if there was a change in mean activity after scheduling. ResultsAcross the five measures, there was most interest in acryl fentanyl, butyr fentanyl, and acetyl fentanyl. The number of daily posts was significantly reduced in nine out of 13 threads after scheduling. ConclusionThe scheduling of fentanyl analogs impacted interest on Flashback.org. The biggest effect sizes were from the narcotics scheduling of 2-Me-MAF, acryl, and acetyl fentanyl, while furanyl fentanyl saw the biggest reduction after health scheduling. The reductions were bigger for narcotics scheduling compared to health scheduling.

Online reported women\u2019s experiences of symptomatic pelvic organ prolapse after vaginal birth

BackgroundPelvic organ prolapse (POP) is a major public health problem with a relative high lifetime risk of surgery. The main risk factor for developing POP is vaginal birth. Many women become symptomatic later in life and most of the existing research on symptomatic pelvic organ prolapse (sPOP) predominantly concentrates on the effects of the condition on postmenopausal women. However bothersome symptoms of POP can be reported as early as in women’s 20s and may occur shortly after vaginal birth. Limited studies provide an insight into daily life of fertile women with sPOP. Thus, we aimed to explore fertile women’s experiences of symptomatic pelvic organ (sPOP) after vaginal birth.MethodsAn inductive, text-driven approach was taken by selecting thread posts from an internet forum written by 33 Swedish fertile women who had experienced sPOP after vaginal birth.ResultsThe overarching theme “being irreparably damaged” was identified as representing an experience of being disabled by sPOP after vaginal birth. The fertile women experienced that their lives were ruined because of physical and psychological limitations caused by this unexpected, unfamiliar and unexplained condition. Living with sPOP impinged on sexual health, restricted daily and sports activities and affected the women’s ability to fulfill everyday parental duties. This in turn compromised women’s psychological health. In addition, the negligence of healthcare professionals who tended to trivialize and normalize the symptoms led to the belief that there were no sustainable treatments and that women would have to live with bothersome symptoms of POP for rest of their lives.ConclusionsThis study found that sPOP had a significant negative impact on fertile women’s lives. The women indicated that they had not had the opportunity to voice their concerns and had not been taken seriously by healthcare professionals. It is of the utmost importance to acknowledge this problem and develop guidelines for prevention and management of sPOP to improve the quality of life for women.

Mining for gold: Identifying content-related MOOC discussion threads across domains through linguistic modeling

This study addresses overload and chaos in MOOC discussion forums by developing a model to categorize threads based on whether or not they are substantially related to course content. A linguistic model was built based on manually coded starting posts in threads from a statistics MOOC, and tested on the second offering of the course, another statistics MOOC, a psychology MOOC, a physiology MOOC, and a test set of reply posts. Results showed that content-related starting posts had distinct linguistic features that appeared unrelated to the domain. The model demonstrated good reliability for all starting posts in statistics and psychology as well as for reply posts (accuracy ranged from 0.80 to 0.85). Reliability for starting posts in physiology was lower but still provided reasonably good predictive ability (accuracy was 0.73). The classification model was useful across all time segments of the courses; the number of views and votes threads received were not helpful.

Understanding user intents in online health forums.

Online health forums provide a convenient way for patients to obtain medical information and connect with physicians and peers outside of clinical settings. However, large quantities of unstructured and diversified content generated on these forums make it difficult for users to digest and extract useful information. Understanding user intents would enable forums to find and recommend relevant information to users by filtering out threads that do not match particular intents. In this paper, we derive a taxonomy of intents to capture user information needs in online health forums and propose novel pattern-based features for use with a multiclass support vector machine (SVM) classifier to classify original thread posts according to their underlying intents. Since no dataset existed for this task, we employ three annotators to manually label a dataset of 1192 HealthBoards posts spanning four forum topics. Experimental results show that a SVM using pattern-based features is highly capable of identifying user intents in forum posts, reaching a maximum precision of 75%, and that a SVM-based hierarchical classifier using both pattern and word features outperforms its SVM counterpart that uses only word features. Furthermore, comparable classification performance can be achieved by training and testing on posts from different forum topics.

Clustering Posts in Online Discussion Forum Threads

Online discussion forums are considered a challenging repository for data mining tasks. Forums usually contain hundreds of threads which in turn consist of hundreds, or even thousands, of posts. Clustering posts can be used to discover outlier and off-topic posts and would provide better visualization and exploration of online threads.In this paper, we propose the Leader-based Post Clustering (LPC), a modification to the Leader algorithm to be applied to the domain of clustering posts in threads of discussion boards. We also suggest using asymmetric pair-wise distances to measure the dissimilarity between posts. We further investigate the effect of indirect distance between posts, and how to calibrate it with the direct distance. In order to evaluate the proposed methods, we conduct experiments using artificial and real threads extracted from Slashdot and Ciao discussion forums. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the LPC algorithm when using the linear combination of direct and indirect distances, as well as using an averaging approach to evaluate a representative indirect distance. Furthermore, the results show the potential of the LPC algorithm for detecting off-topic or outlier posts compared with two state-of-the-art methods for off-topic post detection.

Posting, quoting, and replying: a comparison of methodological approaches to measure communication ties in web forums

Active involvement in discussion-based communities is nowadays a firm part of people’s online activities. The measurement of communication ties and networks between contributors to such domains is thus becoming a relevant research question in social sciences. However, especially in web forums, very often almost no direct relational information exists that would indicate the presence of communication ties among contributors. In contrast with the reply-to structure of Usenet newsgroup or mailing list conversations that contain explicit relational information created by the contributors, some web forums only enable participants to add new posts to threads or to quote preceding posts in threads. When discussions emerge, it is difficult to identify who is replying to whom. Drawing on the social network studies dealing with the conversational patterns in Usenet and web forums, this paper presents an alternative approach to identifying the ties between authors of posts. Several assumptions are discussed, and different measures are developed and empirically evaluated. The findings provide a starting point for the development of a standardized methodology for studying social networks in online communities where only limited direct information about communication ties is available.