Public Facebook Pages Research Articles

Comparing Gendered Exposure and Impact in Online Election Violence: Tunisian Political Candidates Targeted on Facebook

Abstract Election violence is increasingly taking place online. However, we still do not know much about how such attacks affect the representation of politically marginalized groups such as women. This article develops and applies strategies for analyzing (gendered) exposure to and impacts of online attacks against political candidates. It focuses on the 2019 parliamentary election campaign in Tunisia and combines manual analysis of Tunisian candidates’ public Facebook pages with candidate interviews. We find no gendered patterns in exposure to online election violence in the Facebook data and a low general exposure to attacks. The interview data nevertheless suggests gendered perceptions and impacts of attacks, as well as a perception among the candidates that online election violence is widespread and problematic. These discrepancies highlight that we need a combination of methods and materials to capture the multifaceted nature of online election violence, and in particular those that directly link candidate exposure to impact.

Polite Language on Facebook: Maintaining Ethics in Interactions on Social Media

The objective of this study was to examine the present condition of politeness in language usage on Facebook, determine the factors that impact the use of polite language, and suggest approaches to promote civility in digital interactions. Using a qualitative methodology, the data collection process involved analyzing the content of posts and comments from public Facebook pages and groups. Additionally, semi-structured interviews were conducted with users to gather their personal experiences and perceptions. Our analysis of the content uncovered notable disparities in the levels of politeness observed. Community-oriented groups demonstrated elevated levels of politeness, likely attributed to their shared interests and established norms. Conversely, discussions centered around political matters were more susceptible to impoliteness, largely influenced by the anonymity of participants and the intensity of emotions involved. Interviews emphasized the significance of cultural variations, the design features of Facebook, and the crucial role of personal responsibility in upholding politeness. Effective moderation and well-defined guidelines were determined to be essential in handling discourteous conduct. The results highlight the importance of adopting a holistic strategy towards digital communication, encompassing the promotion of cultural sensitivity, the improvement of digital literacy, and the development of ethical platform features. These measures aim to cultivate a more respectful and constructive online environment.

The meaning of obstetric violence experiences: A qualitative content analysis of the Break the Silence Campaign

BackgroundObstetric violence involves the mistreatment, disrespect, and abuse of birthing people and the problem has been recognized in healthcare systems worldwide. Obstetric violence is a gendered, sex-specific form of violence against women that is a public health problem and a violation of human rights. There are an unknowable number of online posts and social media messages that describe obstetric violence experiences. There are no known studies about self-published experiences of obstetric violence in the US maternity care system. ObjectiveTo understand the meaning of obstetric violence experiences in the US maternity care system from a naturally occurring, purposive sample. DesignA secondary analysis of the textual data from the original Break the Silence social media campaign using qualitative content analysis. The theory of social justice in nursing provided a theoretical framework. A healthcare systems approach was used for a wide-angle view of the multidirectional structure, processes, and outcome of obstetric violence. SettingThe study setting is the public Facebook page where the Break the Silence social media campaign can be seen. Break the Silence was an online activism response to the problem of obstetric violence in the US maternity care system with signboard messages posted from 31 known US states. The setting is bounded by the digital page where the campaign is published. ParticipantsThere were 139 participants, and 11 of them posted more than one signboard message. Most participants were birthing people (n = 125) followed by doulas (n = 10). MethodsKrippendorff's methodology for qualitative content analysis was applied to 156 signboard messages posted on Break the Silence from 2014 to 2016. Qualitative content analysis was supported by Atlas.ti 23. ResultsFour themes illustrated the meaning of obstetric violence in US maternity care: 1) pregnancy and birth as a battle with healthcare providers and the healthcare system, 2) sacrifice of the maternal body normalized and assumed as a gender stereotype, 3) disrupted rites of passage from childbirth, and 4) abuse of fiduciary power by healthcare providers. ConclusionsThis study demonstrated thematic meanings for the experience of obstetric violence in US maternity care with a healthcare systems approach that included structural and organizational considerations to increase understanding. Categories and forms of obstetric violence from the existing literature were expanded and strengthened by findings from this study. Themes were validated in principle with consistency in findings across the international evidence base on obstetric violence.Tweetable abstract: The meaning of #obstetricviolence experiences is interpersonal and structural with thematic consistency across international studies.

Keeping it real: A signaling theory perspective on authentic claims of gang membership made on social media

The advent of social media has transformed the landscape of street gang dynamics. Although existing research has documented gang members’ use of social media—including identity performance, rival taunting, promoting gang culture, and conflict de-escalation—it often lacks a theoretical foundation and process-oriented view of these digital interactions. This study advances a signaling timeline approach to fill this gap. We apply it to a case study of Chicago Latino gangs and qualitative content analysis performed on 2849 posts and thousands more replies and comments web-scraped from a public Facebook page. Our theoretical framework decodes the intricate language of gang communications on social media to uncover the mechanisms behind interpretations and perceptions of gang members’ authenticity and the reasons behind the public nature of what might otherwise be considered clandestine activities. Ultimately this research contributes to understanding the digital negotiation of gang dynamics, highlighting the strategic use of communication in cyberspace.

Protesting the lockdown: geo-indexing a movement publicly opposing Covid-19 policies on Facebook

ABSTRACT The Covid-19 pandemic saw restrictions being implemented to curb the spread of the virus. This seeded anti-lockdown demonstrations across the globe. Leveraging network, quantitative and qualitative textual analysis tools, we scrutinize the expression of opposition to these restrictions on 96 public Facebook groups and pages, and its connection to physical places across the globe. To grapple with this relation, we propose the concept of geo-indexing as the practice of adding meaning to physical places on social media and identify a transnational network of geo-indexed posts. Importantly, this geo-indexed opposition was framed as unified against an unjust and undemocratic imposition of restrictive measures. The language used in some of this communication was conspiratorial, albeit to a lesser degree than expected. Moreover, geo-indexed posts were used to evidence the scale of public mobilization, the cohesion of the protests, to articulate the virtue of transgressing health measures and to extoll those who said or did so, across multiple sites.

EVERYDAY HATE ON FACEBOOK: VISUAL MISOGYNY AND THE ANTI-FEMINIST MOVEMENT IN INDIA

The #metoo movement has been one of the key social movements which has ushered in a change in structural relations in the society. In the Indian context, the movement has meant giving a powerful platform to women address generations of sexual assault in the Indian society. However, the #metoo movement has also witnessed a counter-response from the growing online ‘men’s rights activists’ (MRA) community. This study focuses on the online presence of MRA movement in India and the practice of everyday visual misogyny on their Facebook pages. I specifically focus on the public Facebook page of Save Indian Family Movement. The paper focuses on visual posts like images in form of memes and distorted news clips shared on their public page with the aim of capturing visual misogyny. The selection criteria were to manually collect all posts with an image for a duration of three months (17 October, 2022 – 21 January, 2023). I focus on this timeframe to cover the three months after Justice Chandrachud--who is not seen favourably amongst the MRA community for his progressive judgements --was appointed as the new Chief Justice of India. The dataset of images only contains either memes or cartoons or news clips. I employ an iterative multimodal critical discourse analysis approach to analyse the visual posts and categorise them based on the schema of explicit and implicit misogyny developed by Strathern and Pfeffer (2022). The findings suggest majority of the visual posts fall within the implicit misogyny category.

Slovak MPs’ response to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine in light of conspiracy theories and the polarization of political discourse

The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine received widespread international condemnation. In Slovakia, the invasion became a subject of much political discussion with large number of MPs openly advocating Russian interests. This study investigates Slovak political discourse on Facebook in the weeks before and after the invasion began. We examine the discourse through the lens of Discourse Network Analysis, combining qualitative content analysis of MPs’ Facebook posts with quantitative bipartite social network analysis. During the two weeks, we retrieved all (n = 1880) posts from all (n = 117) MPs who had an active public Facebook page. We manually coded all posts and created a bipartite discourse network consisting of MPs connected to each other via shared discourse codes in two timepoints. We performed a series of exploratory analyses that identified the content of the political discourse, the structure of the political discourse network, and the mechanisms driving the change of the political discourse network. Our results show that the invasion dramatically changed political discourse in Slovakia, with the domestic coalition-opposition struggles losing prominence among the invasion-related topics. The structure of the political discourse network showed a strong coalition-opposition split. While coalition MPs had largely pro-Ukrainian sentiments, opposition MPs largely communicated pro-Russian propaganda. A cluster of opposition MPs consistently spread conspiracy theories both before and after the invasion began, supporting a “conspiracy singularity” theory—the tendency of actors to spread multiple different conspiracy theories and interconnect various conspiracy theories into one overarching narrative. The change of the discourse network at the beginning of the invasion was largely driven by the agenda setting of several parties, agenda reinforcement, and increasing political polarization. We discuss our findings in relation to the previous research on the spread of conspiracy theories among politicians and the polarization of political discourse during the invasion, and we suggest implications for future research.

Leveraging the Black Girls Run Web-Based Community as a Supportive Community for Physical Activity Engagement: Mixed Methods Study.

About 59%-73% of Black women do not meet the recommended targets for physical activity (PA). PA is a key modifiable lifestyle factor that can help mitigate risk for chronic diseases such as obesity, diabetes, and hypertension that disproportionately affect Black women. Web-based communities focused on PA have been emerging in recent years as web-based gathering spaces to provide support for PA in specific populations. One example is Black Girls Run (BGR), which is devoted to promoting PA in Black women. The purpose of this study was to describe the content shared on the BGR public Facebook page to provide insight into how web-based communities engage Black women in PA and inform the development of web-based PA interventions for Black women. Using Facebook Crowdtangle, we collected posts (n=397) and associated engagement data from the BGR public Facebook page for the 6-month period between June 1, 2021, and December 31, 2021. We pooled data in Dedoose to analyze the qualitative data and conducted a content analysis of qualitative data. We quantified types of posts, post engagement, and compared post types on engagement: "like," "love," "haha," "wow," "care," "sad," "angry," "comments," and "shares." The content analysis revealed 8 categories of posts: shout-outs to members for achievements (n=122, 31%), goals or motivational (n=65, 16%), announcements (n=63, 16%), sponsored or ads (n=54, 14%), health related (n=47, 11%), the lived Black experience (n=23, 6%), self-care (n=15, 4%), and holidays or greetings (n=8, 2%). The 397 posts attracted a total of 55,354 engagements (reactions, comments, and shares). Associations between the number of engagement and post categories were analyzed using generalized linear models. Shout-out posts (n=22,268) elicited the highest average of total user engagement of 181.7 (SD 116.7), followed by goals or motivational posts (n=11,490) with an average total engagement of 160.1 (SD 125.2) and announcements (n=7962) having an average total engagement of 129.9 (SD 170.7). Significant statistical differences were found among the total engagement of posts (χ72=80.99, P<.001), "like" (χ72=119.37, P<.001), "love" (χ72=63.995, P<.001), "wow" (χ72=23.73, P<.001), "care" (χ72=35.06, P<.001), "comments" (χ72=80.55, P<.001), and "shares" (χ72=71.28, P<.001). The majority of content on the BGR Facebook page (n=250, 63%) was focused on celebrating member achievements, motivating members to get active, and announcing and promoting active events. These types of posts attracted 75% of total post engagement. BGR appears to be a rich web-based community that offers social support for PA as well as culturally relevant health and social justice content. Web-based communities may be uniquely positioned to engage minoritized populations in health behavior. Further research should explore how and if web-based communities such as BGR can be interwoven into health interventions and health promotion.

The autosomamediality of neurodivergent folks’ Facebook pages

This article employs life narrative scholarship to examine four neurodivergent (ND) folks’ public Facebook (FB) pages that are making important contributions to the growing representation of ND culture in online spaces and social media. It argues that the participatory, networked, digital, online space of FB facilitates autobiographical acts at the intersection of automedia and autosomatography, where the latter finds its most realized form, and where these multimodal, connected, dynamic manifestations of disabled lives are best defined by an elision of the two terms (automedia and autosomatography): autosomamedia.

Analyzing Public Conversations About Heart Disease and Heart Health on Facebook From 2016 to 2021: Retrospective Observational Study Applying Latent Dirichlet Allocation Topic Modeling.

Heart disease continues to be the leading cause of death in men and women in the United States. The COVID-19 pandemic has further led to increases in various long-term cardiovascular complications. This study analyzed public conversations related to heart disease and heart health on Facebook in terms of their thematic topics and sentiments. In addition, it provided in-depth analyses of 2 subtopics with important practical implications: heart health for women and heart health during the COVID-19 pandemic. We collected 34,885 posts and 51,835 comments spanning from June 2016 to June 2021 that were related to heart disease and health from public Facebook pages and groups. We used latent Dirichlet allocation topic modeling to extract discussion topics illuminating the public's interests and concerns regarding heart disease and heart health. We also used Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (Pennebaker Conglomerates, Inc) to identify public sentiments regarding heart health. We observed an increase in discussions related to heart health on Facebook. Posts and comments increased from 3102 and 3632 in 2016 to 8550 (176% increase) and 14,617 (302% increase) in 2021, respectively. Overall, 35.37% (12,340/34,885) of the posts were created after January 2020, the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. In total, 39.21% (13,677/34,885) of the posts were by nonprofit health organizations. We identified 6 topics in the posts (heart health promotion, personal experiences, risk-reduction education, heart health promotion for women, educational information, and physicians' live discussion sessions). We identified 6 topics in the comments (personal experiences, survivor stories, risk reduction, religion, medical questions, and appreciation of physicians and information on heart health). During the pandemic (from January 2020 to June 2021), risk reduction was a major topic in both posts and comments. Unverified information on alternative treatments and promotional content was also prevalent. Among all posts, 14.91% (5200/34,885) were specifically about heart health for women centering on local event promotion and distinctive symptoms of heart diseases for women. Our results tracked the public's ongoing discussions on heart disease and heart health on one prominent social media platform, Facebook. The public's discussions and information sharing on heart health increased over time, especially since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Various levels of health organizations on Facebook actively promoted heart health information and engaged a large number of users. Facebook presents opportunities for more targeted heart health interventions that can reach and engage diverse populations.

Gender, party and performance in the 2020 New Zealand general election: politicking on Facebook with Jacinda and Judith

New Zealand’s 2020 General Election campaign was unusual, though not unprecedented, in featuring women as both Prime Minister (Jacinda Ardern, Labour) and Leader of the Opposition (Judith Collins, National). To explore the extent to which gender, party and style intersected in their social media positioning, we analysed all posts made on the two Party Leaders’ public Facebook pages. We found both quantitative (post frequency and composition, main topic and policy issues, audience reactions) and qualitative differences (tone, presentational style) but importantly, our research suggests that neither woman ‘performed’ gender in normatively stereotypical ways.

“The end justifies the memes”: A feminist relational discourse analysis of the role of macro memes in facilitating supportive discussions for victim-survivors of narcissistic abuse

This article reports the results of a qualitative study which aimed to investigate the role of internet memes in facilitating supportive discussions among women on an online platform concerning narcissistic abuse. Narcissistic abuse is an under-recognised form of abuse underpinning experiences of domestic abuse and intimate partner violence. The study focuses upon women’s communication through the use of Facebook memes. Studying these and their associated content/posts is important for examining narcissistic abuse experiences because memes have been identified as immediate conveyors of meaning, and associated posts and comments provide rich data that can generate new findings pertinent to abuse and support experiences. A total of 4 public Facebook pages concerning narcissistic abuse were used to analyse 100 memes and their attached comments/posts, which ranged from 15 to 175 per meme with an arithmetic mean of 39.4. Employing a feminist relational discourse analysis (FRDA) framework, the data were categorised in terms of thematic frames and dominant discourses of victim-survivors. The analysis identified how community-specific Facebook pages assisted help-seeking discussions and expressions of distress. It also suggested that memes function as speech acts to discursively shape online conversations related to experiences of narcissistic abuse. As immediate conveyors of meaning, memes facilitated emotional expression to provide psychosocial support and a form of feminist activism to those who experienced feelings of isolation and marginalisation within broader political, psychological, and social contexts.

Assessing the Impact of Digital Alternative News Media in a Hybrid News Environment: Cases from Taiwan and Hong Kong

As consumption of mainstream news media declines and alternative news media proliferates, in this paper, we seek to assess the impact of digital alternative news media (DANM) in relation to mainstream news media (MNM). We examine the range of DANM, especially public Facebook pages, related to two large-scale social movements neighbouring mainland China as case studies of social movement media exerting maximalist effects. The assessment relies on academic sources, archival materials, descriptive social media metrics, and an original analysis of external content shared on public Facebook pages and groups using data collected from the Facebook Graph API. A six-dimensional scheme is proposed to guide the assessment. Sorting through and piecing together multiple sources, we arrive at a multi-faceted description, comparison, and analysis of the impact of DANM during two social movements.

The Syrian War on Facebook: A call for mixed methods

In this paper, I analyze thirty-two public Facebook pages that actively support a side in the ongoing Syrian turmoil to study users’ online expressions to test whether the war has translated metaphorically onto these Facebook pages. This study is in conversation with and contributes to the online political polarization scholarship, the role of online platforms in the “Arab Spring,” and the digital methods used to analyze online data in Arabic. I use a supervised, machine-learning approach to classify more than four million unique comments and more than seventy thousand unique posts, from Facebook to test whether the Facebook pages are becoming warring spaces where opposing parties “fight.” Or whether they are producing spaces for conversations and “connections”? Or whether they are just echo chambers? My findings show that these pages are producing echo chambers rather than becoming warring spaces or conversing spaces. My findings also show that religious expressions are overwhelmingly used by all sides. I conclude by suggesting future methodological and analytical approaches for research of Social Network Sites (SNS).

Polarisation or just differences in opinion: How and why Facebook users disagree about Greta Thunberg

To what extent was Greta Thunberg a ‘polarizing figure’ on Facebook, in the period when she received the most extensive media attention? The paper analyses seven months of discussion concerning Thunberg and her message of intergenerational climate justice, using all relevant posts on public Facebook pages in Germany, Sweden, and the UK. We find that there are many similarities in the attitudes expressed and topics discussed on Facebook in the three countries; however, there are also some striking differences in the levels of polarisation. This comparative study provides evidence that the level of polarisation around these topics on Facebook is very low in Sweden and the UK, but high in Germany. In Germany, a group of political actors stand out as particularly polarising, and, in contrast to the other two countries, the topic of intergeneration justice, the core of Thunberg’s message, is almost absent from the German Facebook discourse. The study shows that Thunberg was not in general a polarising figure in the three European countries and that neither the affordances offered by the platform nor features of her person, message, or activism explain the observed polarisation around Thunberg on Facebook.

Identifying Spam Activity on Public Facebook Pages

Since their emergence, online social networks (OSNs) keep gaining popularity. However, many related problems have also arisen, such as the use of fake accounts for malicious activities. In this paper, we focus on identifying spammers among users that are active on public Facebook pages. We are specifically interested in identifying groups of spammers sharing similar URLs. For this purpose, we built an initial dataset based on all the content that has been posted upon feed posts on a set of public Facebook pages with high numbers of subscribers. We assumed that such public pages, with hundreds of thousands of subscribers and revolving around a common attractive topic, make an ideal ground for spamming activity. Our first contribution in this paper is a reliable methodology that helps in identifying potential spammer and non-spammer accounts that are likely to be tagged as, respectively, spammers/non-spammers upon manual verification. For that aim, we used a set of features characterizing spam activity with a coring method. This methodology, combined with manual human validation, successfully allowed us to build a dataset of spammers and non-spammers. Our second contribution is the analysis of the identified spammer accounts. We found that these accounts do not display any community-like behavior as they rarely interact with each other, and are slightly more active than non-spammers during late-night hours, while slightly less active during daytime hours. Finally, our third contribution is the proposal of a clustering approach that successfully detected 16 groups of spammers in the form of clusters of spam accounts sharing similar URLs.

How Threats of Exclusion Mobilize Palestinian Political Participation

AbstractDo exclusionary policies mobilize minority political participation? We theorize that the threat of exclusionary policies creates and resurfaces grievances that facilitate mobilization. To test our theory, we leverage Donald Trump's announcement of a peace plan for the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, which posed a threat to the citizenship status of Palestinian citizens of Israel residing in the Triangle area adjacent to the West Bank. First, using more than 170,000 posts from public Facebook groups and pages, we show that Trump's announcement was indeed a more salient political event for Triangle residents. Then, employing locality‐level election data as well as records detailing the origin of citizens’ joining a Jewish‐Arab social movement, we use a difference‐in‐difference design to demonstrate that the threat to citizenship imposed by Trump's plan increased mobilization in the Triangle area. Our evidence from three distinct data sources suggests that threats of exclusion can mobilize minority political behavior.

Girls’ portrayals in fast fashion advertisements

ABSTRACT This study analyses the visual construction of girls and notions surrounding young femininities articulated by 15 contemporary advertisements of Nordic fast fashion companies, available on their public Facebook pages in Finland. A visual discourse analysis identifies some blatantly stereotypical and a few complex visual constructions of girls as heterosexual, caring, innocent, sexy posers, active self-presenters and self-surveyors, carefree and environmental activists. The implications of our findings, particularly in shaping societal notions surrounding girls, are discussed. The study contributes primarily to the research field of visual commercial representation of girls by unpacking how their complex portrayals can create an equivocation that eventually resurrects stereotypes surrounding young femininities. It advances studies on Nordic consumer culture by highlighting that girls’ portrayals by Nordic companies may not clearly reflect the values of state feminism. The study can benefit marketers by sensitising them to how the complex visual representations of girls may (re)produce stereotypes.

‘You got this!’: A critical discourse analysis of toxic positivity as a discursive construct on Facebook

• Toxic positivity is a discursive construct on social media. • Toxic positive responses may come across as paternalistic or dismissive. • Toxic positive discourse is often based on illogical reasoning. • It reflects neoliberal positive thinking ideology. An increasing number of Australian organisations and charities are making use of social media platforms to raise public awareness, gather funds, organise events, and educate and support individuals with invisible chronic conditions (ICCs). During the COVID-19 crisis, the social disconnectedness already experienced by individuals with ICCs led to a rapid rise in their use of social media, mainly for emotional purposes. Although more and more systemic functional linguistic studies of electronically mediated discourse are being carried out, few of them have focused on dialogical interaction and power relationships between organisations engaging with social media, and their followers. The article examines several types of discourse on two public Facebook pages advocating for endometriosis awareness. It adopts a discourse-analytical approach to show how the discursive construct of toxic positivity is enmeshed in power and ideology. Two corpora of posts and comments were extracted from the Endometriosis Australia and MyEndometroisisTeam Facebook pages and analysed combining Systemic Functional Linguistics, Pragma-dialectics, and critical theory. The study revealed that both dominant and other interlocutors on the social media platform often engage in discursive moves inspired by neoliberal ‘positive thinking’ ideology, resulting in a less inclusive SNS platform, which may be redressed by an increased use of affirmative discourse.

Use of Live Community Events on Facebook to Share Health and Clinical Research Information With a Minnesota Statewide Community: Exploratory Study.

BackgroundCommunity engagement can make a substantial difference in health outcomes and strengthen the capacity to deal with disruptive public health events such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Social media platforms such as Facebook are a promising avenue to reach the broader public and enhance access to clinical and translational science, and require further evaluation from the scientific community.ObjectiveThis study aims to describe the use of live community events to enhance communication about clinical and health research through a Facebook platform case study (Minnesota [MN] Research Link) with a Minnesota statewide community. We examined variables associated with video engagement including video length and type of posting.MethodsFrom June 2019 to February 2021, MN Research Link streamed 38 live community events on its public Facebook page, MN Research Link. Live community events highlighted different investigators’ clinical and health research in the areas of mental health, health and wellness, chronic diseases, and immunology/infectious diseases. Facebook analytics were used to determine the number of views, total minutes viewed, engagement metrics, and audience retention. An engagement rate was calculated by the total number of interactions (likes, shares, and comments) divided by the total length of the live event by the type of live community event.ResultsThe 38 live community events averaged 23 minutes and 1 second in duration. The total time viewed for all 38 videos was 10 hours, 44 minutes, and 40 seconds. Viewers’ watch time averaged 23 seconds of content per video. After adjusting for video length, promotional videos and research presentations had the highest engagement and retention rates. Events that included audience participation did not have higher retention rates compared to events without audience participation.ConclusionsThe use of live community events showed adequate levels of engagement from participants. A view time of 23 seconds on average per video suggests that short informational videos engage viewers of clinical and translational science content. Live community events on Facebook can be an effective method of advancing health promotion and clinical and translational science content; however, certain types of events have more impact on engagement than others.