Social Media Network Analysis Research Articles

Communication Network of Digital Opinion Movement in the Formation of Personal Data Protection Regulation

The rise of data theft in the digital space has prompted the public to call for regulations regarding data security to be implemented immediately. Opinions in the form of requests for the passing of the Personal Data Protection Law (UUPDP) via social media Twitter have become very widely discussed. UUPDP is a regulation related to personal data protection to fill the regulatory void in the digital space. The keyword UUPDP became a topic of conversation on Twitter when the UUPDP personal data protection law was passed by the government and the DPR. The aim of this research is to map the Digital Opinion Movement through communication networks and identify influential actors in communication networks using the keyword UUPDP on Twitter. This research uses the Social Media Network Analysis (SMNA) method. The theory used to answer this case is the Digital Movement of Opinion/DMO theory and communication network theory. information collected via Twitter from 11 September 2022 – 21 September 2022. Stages in analyzing and retrieving data using the website based Netlytic.org application and Gephi software. The use of this tool is used to map influential actors involved in the communication network using UUPDP keywords, next to measure centrality using the indicators of degree centrality, betweenness centrality, closeness centrality and eigenvector centrality. The results of the research are 2 (two) main actors who influence the movement of digital opinion in communication networks with the keyword UUPDP, namely @franken_blues and @hunterjagar3.

Visualization on Twitter Activism Networks and Opinion Leaders: The Case of #FreeWestPapua

<p class="Default"><strong>Introduction: </strong>This study tries to visualize the Twitter activism networks and their opinion leader with the case of #FreeWestPapua activism. This study is important to find out who the opinion leaders and their networks are. This study also provides an overview of how the opinion leader frames opinions about #FreeWestPapua activism on Twitter.</p><p class="Default"><strong>Methods: </strong>This research used Social Media Network Analysis (SMNA). The SMNA method is the application of the Social Network Analysis (SNA) method to examine conversations on social media. Data collection and data processing are collected and visualised with Netlytic.</p><p><strong>Findings: </strong>The results showed that there are 13 opinion leaders and all of the opinion leaders are from outside Papua. This study concluded that there is alienation in separatist activism in the case of #FreeWestPapua on Twitter. The most influential opinion leader in the separatist activism on Twitter is @VeronicaKoman who has the biggest values and is also active to frame public opinion. #FreeWestpapua activism framed Indonesia as a colonial in diagnostic framing and #FreeWestPapua as a solution in prognostic framing. To attract support from the international community, opinion leaders in #FreeWestPapua activism took advantage of the various #BlackLivesMatter issue and other international moments such as Korindo news by BBC.com.</p><strong>Originality:</strong> Although a lot of research on the Free Papua Movement has been done, there has never been a study explains about who opinion leaders and their networks and also how they are framed public opinion about #FreeWestPapua activism on social media.

Creation, dissemination, and evaluation of videos to promote COVID-19 vaccination in India: A research protocol.

Background: Vaccine hesitancy is one of the greatest challenges to the success of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccination campaigns. Videos promoting vaccines have a narrow scope focusing solely on facts, and less on the emotional and narrative elements of communication that can be equally persuasive. The role of humor, for example, has remained largely unexplored. Objective: This study investigates whether theory-based videos can change people's attitudes, beliefs, and intentions to receive the second COVID-19 vaccine. Our primary research question is: How do collectivistic and individualistic appeals, humor, and protagonist gender individually and jointly affect vaccination attitudes, beliefs, and intentions? Methods: This project tapped into the underutilized Indian film industry-the world's largest film producer-to promote vaccination messaging through short videos. Feedback from a community advisory board was utilized to inform the video scripts that were then shot by a production team. Eight videos were filmed and shared by adopting a 2 (appeal: individualistic or collectivistic) x 2 (tone: humor or non-humor) x 2 (protagonist gender: male or female) between-subjects design approach. Our sample includes Odia-speaking participants aged between 18 - 35 years old randomly assigned to watch one of the eight study videos. An online survey questionnaire, social media network analysis, and small group qualitative interviews will be utilized to explore how the entertainment-education videos can be used to reduce vaccine hesitancy. Discussion: Vaccine messages do not fall into a cultural or cognitive vacuum. People process and make sense of information based on their prior experience, properties of the message, and their social environment. Yet, these considerations have taken secondary importance in vaccine communications. This research shows that it is possible to deliver high-caliber videoscreated in accordance with the audience'scultural and cognitive background. Conclusions: This study will inform future health promotion messaging through brief videos on the internet.

Creation, dissemination, and evaluation of videos to promote COVID-19 vaccination in India: A research protocol.

Background: Vaccine hesitancy is one of the greatest challenges to the success of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccination campaigns. Videos promoting vaccines have a narrow scope focusing solely on facts, and less on the emotional and narrative elements of communication that can be equally persuasive. The role of humor, for example, has remained largely unexplored. Objective: This study investigates whether theory-based videos can change people's attitudes, beliefs, and intentions to receive the second COVID-19 vaccine. Our primary research question is: How do collectivistic and individualistic appeals, humor, and protagonist gender individually and jointly affect vaccination attitudes, beliefs, and intentions? Methods: This project tapped into the underutilized Indian film industry-the world's largest film producer-to promote vaccination messaging through short videos. Feedback from a community advisory board was utilized to inform the video scripts that were then shot by a production team. Eight videos were filmed and shared by adopting a 2 (appeal: individualistic or collectivistic) x 2 (tone: humor or non-humor) x 2 (protagonist gender: male or female) between-subjects design approach. Our sample includes Odia-speaking participants aged between 18 - 35 years old randomly assigned to watch one of the eight study videos. An online survey questionnaire, social media network analysis, and small group qualitative interviews will be utilized to explore how the entertainment-education videos can be used to reduce vaccine hesitancy. Discussion: Vaccine messages do not fall into a cultural or cognitive vacuum. People process and make sense of information based on their prior experience, properties of the message, and their social environment. Yet, these considerations have taken secondary importance in vaccine communications. This research shows that it is possible to deliver high-caliber videoscreated in accordance with the audience'scultural and cognitive background. Conclusions: This study will inform future health promotion messaging through brief videos on the internet.

Political Polarization and Selective Exposure of Social Media Users in Indonesia

This study is intended to answer the question of how political polarization is related to social media users’ posts about Covid-19. The researchers chose health cases related to Covid-19 instead of political issues (e.g. elections) to prove that this political polarization has spread to many areas. The research also wants to see the relationship between this political polarization and selective exposure. Theories applied in this study are polarization, filter bubble, and selective exposure. The study applied two methods: social media network analysis and content analysis. The network analysis included 82,156 posts, while the content analysis was carried out on 4,050 social media accounts. The research outcome proves the occurrence of political polarization. Social media users were divided into two major groups, namely pro-Jokowi and anti-Jokowi. Each group interacted with fellow users who had the same political choices and shared the same message content. Users with certain political choices tend to receive the same information as their political choices, and ignore information from other political parties. Another interesting finding from this study is how this polarization was sharpened by the use of hashtags. Each party (supporters and oppositions of Jokowi) uses hashtags to create solidarity and mobilization from each supporter. Research also proves the validity of the selective exposure and filter bubble hypothesis in the Indonesian context.

Analysis of Social Media Networks based on Self-organizing Feature Maps Approach for Social E-commerce Networks

Analysis of Social Media Networks based on Self-organizing Feature Maps Approach for Social E-commerce Networks

The significance of digital media in local public space crisis management: The case of Poland, the United Kingdom and Italy

This article recognizes the potential and possibilities of digital media in COVID-19 crisis management in different democratic systems. It is the comparative analysis of information management during the COVID-19 pandemic in Poland, the United Kingdom and Italy. From the theoretical approach, the crisis management usually deals with two main models. The first one is defined as the post-reactive model, which is based on reacting to events after the first symptoms of the crisis and the communication model remains the top-down process. The second one is described as the pro-reactive model, which is based on building a dialogue space with the participatory community and it is the bottom-up communication process. In this case, the community becomes an active partner in bridging the crisis. The main goal of the proposed article is to examine the ways in which digital media influences the quality of strategic communication management in local public spaces and what type of crisis management strategy is applied to each political culture. The article discusses the pros and cons of information distributed through digital platforms by both the media and public institutions in terms of community awareness and crisis governance. The article applies a mixed method approach, which includes content analysis (media and governmental digital services), interviews (with the authorities’ members and media representatives) and social media network analysis (mainly Facebook). The analysis has been ongoing since the beginning of the pandemic in Europe (March–September 2020). The research has demonstrated that the shape and distribution of information during the pandemic were of great importance for the quality of information strategy activities. The problem was noticeable disinformation at all levels, which was the result of a lack of control over the message and the pursuit of sensation or conspiracy. It was clearly observed that without the support of crisis communication during the pandemic by the media, mainly digital platforms, it would be impossible to implement it. In all three countries, social media was the ‘information management centre’ in the COVID-19 era, but the activity of individual municipalities was slightly different. As far as the urbanized and semi-urbanized level is concerned, some consistency can be observed. In all three cases, communication on social media platforms was conducted very intensively and with the use of various tools (texts, statistics, instructional videos, scientific articles, infographics, etc.). All the ‘organizers’ of the local public sphere (presidents, mayors, journalists, service representatives) tried to keep in touch with the inhabitants.

Characterization of the #Radiology Twitter Conversation During the Global COVID-19 Pandemic

ObjectiveTo assess the #Radiology conversation on Twitter social media platform during the COVID-19 pandemic. Materials and MethodsFrom February 1 to December 31, 2020, all tweets with a #Radiology hashtag were identified using the healthcare social media analytics tool, Symplur Signals. Data collected included number of tweets, retweets, impressions, links, and user characteristics. Data were stratified by the presence of a COVID-19-related keyword, and a social media network analysis was further performed. ResultsOf the 68,172 tweets, 10,093 contained COVID-19 content from 2809 users generating 65,513,669 impressions. More tweets with COVID-19 content contained links than without (P < 0.01). Network analysis demonstrated most users were physicians (48.10%), authoring the most tweets (40.38%), using the most mentions (32.15%), and retweeting the most (51.45%). The most impressions, however, were by healthcare organizations not providing clinical care (20,235,547 impressions, 30.89%). Users came from 80 countries, most from the United States (29.3%) and the United Kingdom (8.69%). During early March, COVID-19 dominated the #Radiology conversation, making up 54.67% of tweets the week of March 14 and 64.74% of impressions the week of March 21 compared to 13.97% of tweets and 16.76% of impressions in the remainder of the study period (P < 0.01).There was an influx of new users to the #Radiology conversation during this time period with more users tweeting about COVID-19 than not (P < 0.01). ConclusionDiscussion of COVID-19 in the #Radiology community increased significantly during the early weeks of the pandemic. Real time sharing and collaboration proved a useful tool when rapid information dissemination was needed to manage an emerging pathogen.

Dialoguing with Data and Data Reduction: An Observational, Narrowing-Down Approach to Social Media Network Analysis

In this article, we propose an observational, narrowing-down approach to analysing social media networks and developing research design by the joint use of computational algorithms and researchers’ inductive exploration and interpretive explanations. The Brexit referendum on Twitter study is used to illustrate how we applied this approach in practice. In this study, observation helped us combine the strengths of computational statistical analysis and modelling and of inductive inquiries. Computational algorithms and tools including Elasticsearch, Kibana and Gephi provided us with an “ethnographic field” where we were able to inductively observe the relationships among users and to reduce the amount of data down to a level in which we could intuitively understand these relationships. In traditional observational studies, talking to human subjects and observing their interactions in a research site are important to ethnographers. Likewise, it is useful for social science researchers to dialogue with data, observe human relationships embodied in the data and reconstructed by computational tools, and understand these relationships through closely examining a small batch of meaningful data that is extracted from large-scale data. In this case study, adopting the proposed approach, we found the importance of political disagreement leading to a tale of two politicians, in which pro-Brexit users denounced @David_Cameron but legitimised @Nigel_Farage.

Turf wars: Using social media network analysis to examine the suspected astroturfing campaign for the Adani Carmichael Coal mine on Twitter

This article uses social media network analysis (SMNA) to examine whether there was an astroturfing campaign on Twitter in support of the Adani Carmichael coal mine in 2017. It shows that SMNA can be used to visualize and analyze outsider lobbying activity in issue arenas and is capable of identifying networks of fake opinion. This study found that in April 2017, there was a small network of accounts that made a series of suspiciously similar pro‐Adani tweets that could be considered a form of duplicitous lobbying. However, this study concludes that these posts were likely a weak influence on public opinion in Australia and largely ineffectual as a lobbying tactic. Nevertheless, this analysis shows how communitas public interests can be subverted by covert social media campaigns used in support of corporatas goals, as well as the role digital research methods can play in protecting the integrity on public debates by exposing disingenuous actors.