Social Media Responses Research Articles

Online detection of public attitudes towards China's second‐child policy: A linguistic analysis of social media responses

Online detection of public attitudes towards China's second‐child policy: A linguistic analysis of social media responses

Sport fans’ responses on social media to professional athletes’ norm violations

The growth of social media has provided sports fans with unprecedented access to information about celebrity athletes’ personal and professional lives and the means to communicate to them. To date, fan-athlete interactions on social media have often been viewed as positive, with cited benefits of heightened interpersonal relationships and team support. Potential negative consequences of interactions on social media, especially when professional athletes’ personal and professional norm violations are exposed, are not well-understood. Based upon the notion that public shaming practices are often used for the purposes of ensuring that individuals adhere to expected behavioural norms, this study sought to explore the presence and nature of public shaming of professional athletes through social media in response to athletes’ norm violations. A qualitative content analysis of 7700 fans’ comments on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram directed at eleven male and female professional athletes from six different sports and the organisations that employed them were collected. Findings demonstrated fans engage in public shaming of athletes following norm violations, as illustrated through fans’ offers or withdrawals of support, and descriptions of desired physical, psychosocial and career-related consequences for the athletes. Findings are interpreted in light of Braithwaite’s Theory and the influences within and outside of the professional sport environment contributing to public shaming practices are discussed.

Active and Empathic Listening in Social Media: What do Stakeholders Really Expect

Researchers examined expectations and evaluations of active-empathic listening (AEL) during digital dialogic communication between organizations and customers. Through an experimental design, participants (N= 180) rated responses for social media communication from an organization to hypothetical customer messages. Results indicate individuals expect a high level of AEL from organizations’ social media responses, and higher active-empathic responses were rated as more competent. When communicating with an organization via social media, 22.1% stated that the response did not meet expectations versus 76.7% reporting the response met or exceeded expectations. Implications and future research avenues are discussed.

To Eat or Not to Eat Kangaroo: Bargaining over Food Choice in the Anthropocene

To Eat or Not to Eat Kangaroo: Bargaining over Food Choice in the Anthropocene

The Power of Brand Selfies in Consumer-Generated Brand Images

Smartphones have made sharing images of branded experiences nearly effortless. This research classifies social media brand imagery and studies user response. Aside from packshots (standalone product images), two types of brand-related selfie images appear online: consumer selfies (featuring brands and consumers’ faces) and an emerging phenomenon we term brand selfies (invisible consumers holding a branded product). We use convolutional neural networks to identify these archetypes and train language models to infer social media response to more than a quarter million brand-image posts (185 brands on Twitter and Instagram). We find consumer-selfie images receive more sender engagement (i.e., likes and comments), whereas brand selfies result in more brand engagement, expressed by purchase intentions. These results cast doubt on whether conventional social media metrics are appropriate indicators of brand engagement. Results for display ads are consistent with this observation, with higher click-through rates for brand selfies than for consumer selfies. A controlled lab experiment suggests self-reference is driving the differential response to selfie images. Collectively, these results demonstrate how (interpretable) machine learning helps extracting marketing-relevant information from unstructured multimedia content and that selfie images are a matter of perspective in terms of actual brand engagement.

Identity Politics and Resistance: The Social Media Response to the Elk River Chemical Spill

Abstract In 2014, thousands of gallons of a chemical used to clean coal leaked into the Elk River, the source of drinking water for three hundred thousand residents of the Charleston, West Virginia, area. The crisis inspired a community to use new media in acts of resistance against internal othering and to embrace marginalization. With the internet as a tool for social change and a platform for resistance, passionate blog posts went viral and motivated many to comment, reinforcing/re-centering place and space in identity politics. This paper illustrates how one blog post written after the spill created an opportunity and a space for members of a community to use social media to participate in a process of resistance. Their remarks demonstrate the complexity of identity politics in a marginalized region, long defined by otherness.

When women athletes transgress: an exploratory study of image repair and social media response

Following the violation of laws or social norms, professional athletes commonly work to improve their public image and protect their livelihoods. Yet little research has focused on image repair efforts or their reception for women athletes. We consider the cases of two transgressions that took place in 2016: soccer player Abby Wambach’s arrest for driving under the influence and tennis player Maria Sharapova’s admission of a failed drug test. Using Benoit’s image repair theory, we examine each athlete’s image repair strategies on Facebook and Facebook users’ responses. Wambach used mortification and corrective action strategies, while Sharapova used evading responsibility and reducing offensiveness strategies. While there was some rejection of the athletes’ image repair strategies, most users accepted the athletes’ arguments, emphasized their support, and engaged in additional image repair work on behalf of the athletes. We consider contextual factors related to Facebook responses to the athletes’ image repair strategies.

Tweeting about public health policy: Social media response to the UK Government's announcement of a Parliamentary vote on draft standardised packaging regulations.

BackgroundStandardised tobacco packaging has been, and remains, a contentious policy globally, attracting corporate, public health, political, media and popular attention. In January 2015, the UK Government announced it would vote on draft regulations for the policy before the May 2015 General Election. We explored reactions to the announcement on Twitter, in comparison with an earlier period of little UK Government activity on standardised packaging.MethodsWe obtained a random sample of 1038 tweets in two 4-week periods, before and after the UK Government’s announcement. Content analysis was used to examine the following Tweet characteristics: support for the policy, purpose, Twitter-user’s geographical location and affiliation, and evidence citation and quality. Chi-squared analyses were used to compare Tweet characteristics between the two periods.ResultsOverall, significantly more sampled Tweets were in favour of the policy (49%) in comparison to those opposed (19%). Yet, at Time 2, following the announcement, a greater proportion of sampled tweets opposed standardised packaging compared to the period sampled at Time 1, prior to the announcement (p<0.001). The quality of evidence and research cited in URLs linked at Time 2 was significantly lower than at Time 1 (p<0.001), with peer-reviewed research more likely to be shared in positive Tweets (p<0.001) and in Tweets linking to URLs originating from the health sector (p<0.001). The decline in the proportion of positive Tweets was mirrored by a reduction in Tweets by health sector Twitter-users at Time 2 (p<0.001).ConclusionsMicroblogging sites can reflect offline policy debates and are used differently by policy proponents and opponents dependent on the policy context. Twitter-users opposed to standardised packaging increased their activity following the Government’s announcement, while those in support broadly maintained their rate of Twitter engagement. The findings offer insight into the public health community’s options for using Twitter to influence policy and disseminate research. In particular, proliferation of Twitter activity following pro-public health policy announcements could be considered to ensure pro-health messages are not overshadowed by anti-regulation voices.

Public Health Emergency Risk Communication and Social Media Reactions to an Errant Warning of a Ballistic Missile Threat - Hawaii, January 2018.

On January 13, 2018, at 8:07 a.m. Hawaii Standard Time, an errant emergency alert was sent to persons in Hawaii. An employee at the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency (EMA) sent the errant alert via the Wireless Emergency Alert (WEA) system and the Emergency Alert System (EAS) during a ballistic missile preparedness drill, advising persons to seek shelter from an incoming ballistic missile. WEA delivers location-based warnings to wireless carrier systems, and EAS sends alerts via television and radio (1). After 38 minutes, at 8:45 a.m., Hawaii EMA retracted the alert via WEA and EAS (2). To understand the impact of the alert, social media responses to the errant message were analyzed. Data were extracted from Twitter* using a Boolean search for tweets (Twitter postings) posted on January 13 regarding the false alert. Tweets were analyzed during two 38-minute periods: 1) early (8:07-8:45 a.m.), the elapsed time the errant alert circulated until the correction was issued and 2) late (8:46-9:24 a.m.), the same amount of elapsed time after issuance of the correction. A total of 5,880 tweets during the early period and 8,650 tweets during the late period met the search criteria. Four themes emerged during the early period: information processing, information sharing, authentication, and emotional reaction. During the late period, information sharing and emotional reaction themes persisted; denunciation, insufficient knowledge to act, and mistrust of authority also emerged as themes. Understanding public interpretation, sharing, and reaction to social media messages related to emergencies can inform development and dissemination of accurate public health messages to save lives during a crisis.

The #Rhetoric of Waleed Aly’s “Send Forgiveness Viral”: Is Rogerian argumentation an appropriate response to racism?

In 2016, Waleed Aly, a prominent Muslim Australian academic and media personality, made an argument using the Twitter hashtag “Send Forgiveness Viral” that asked for empathy in the face of Islamophobia. While initially appealing, deeper consideration of his use of and appeal to his audience to use Rogerian strategies to combat racism presents problems. Can Rogerian argumentation strategies be utilized to combat racism? Using Aly’s #SendForgivenessViral argument as a case study, this article evaluates Rogerian argumentation and empathic response in therapeutic situations compared to arguments about discrimination, particularly those taking place through social media. While scholarly writing by Lassner (1990) and Ede (1984) is dated, they provide pertinent and influential ideas to consider. More recent scholarship used to evaluate #SendForgivenessViral includes arguments on race, rhetoric, and Twitter revolutions by Brock (2012), D’Cruz (2017), Gerbaudo (2012), Margolin (2017), and Roose (2016). Other sources will be drawn from contemporary social media responses to Aly’s segment. This article concludes that Aly’s use of Rogerian argumentation is flawed because it places the onus of combatting racism onto victims. Furthermore, Rogerian argumentation models have underlying problems with power relations.

Our Legacy Needs To Be Better

In this short essay, I analyze a poem and performance that I wrote as a part of the Opening Session for the 2017 National Communication Association annual convention. In the poem, which is a response to and inspired by Ed Mabrey's “The Libretto of the Opera: Death of a Black Boy,” I take us through a day on social media and the news cycle after a Black boy has been murdered by police officers. The poem illuminates dangerous social media responses centered in whiteness post-Black death in the United States. In the essay, I explicate my process for writing this performance—centering the need for reflexivity instead of white guilt so that white people can do clearly antiracist work. I end by focusing on academia's potential for leaving a stronger and more positive legacy.

Pro-social messages and transcendence: A content analysis of Facebook reactions to Mark Zuckerberg's donation pledge

This quantitative content analysis of over 4000 Facebook posts explores the connections between transcendence-related character strengths and emotions expressed on social media in response to Mark Zuckerberg's pledge to give away 99% of his Facebook shares to charity. We found that (a) other-oriented hope was found in over half of the posts expressing hopeful thinking; (b) appreciation of moral beauty and excellence was the most prevalent moral emotion or character strength expressed in response to this prosocial act on Facebook; and (c) the presence of appreciation of moral beauty and excellence was positively correlated with the presence of hope, other-oriented hope, and spirituality. Implications of the study are discussed.

The Blackfish Effect: Corporate and Policy Change in the Face of Shifting Public Opinion on Captive Cetaceans

In February 2010, a captive killer whale (Orcinus orca), or orca, killed his trainer at SeaWorld Florida. A cascade of events followed, including successful federal enforcement action against SeaWorld for employee safety violations. In 2012 and 2015, nonfiction books about SeaWorld's history with orcas were published; however, the 2013 documentary Blackfish has done the most to raise public awareness of captive orca welfare and trainer safety. It spawned a massive social media response, leading to the so-called "Blackfish Effect." SeaWorld's visitor numbers declined, business partners ended their relationships, and stock price plummeted. In 2012, Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta applied for a permit to import 18 wild-caught beluga whales from Russia; the permit was denied in 2013, the first time a public display permit had ever been denied in the history of the US Marine Mammal Protection Act. In 2014 and 2016, the California legislature considered bills phasing out captive orca exhibits in the state; the 2016 bill passed and became law in January 2017. In November 2015, a similar bill was introduced (and reintroduced in March 2017) in the US House of Representatives. In March 2016 SeaWorld announced it would end its orca breeding program company-wide and in January 2018 the Vancouver Aquarium announced it would no longer display cetaceans. Shifts in public perception of captive cetacean display strongly suggest policy makers should reconsider the legislative and regulatory status quo.

Modeling Human Behavior on Social Media in Response to Significant Events

Social media provides abundant, naturally occurring data on communications among people that can reveal their behavior. Recent technological advancements have made possible the rapid processing of social media data with the potential to learn more about human behavior. In order to do so, however, there is a need for a comprehensive and integrative theoretical model of human behavior as expressed in social media. In addition, such a model should provide specific avenues for staging behavioral interventions. The objective of this paper is to address this deficiency in the context of behaviors that occur in response to significant events. Relevant theories of human behavior are presented as well as a methodology, utilizing natural language processing and social network analysis, for measuring elements of human behavior. The methodology provides numerical measures for each element, which serve as input data for the multivariate statistical model used to answer research questions in a case study of human behavior in response to a natural disaster. For this case study, three behaviors associated with the warning response process were modeled: 1) obtain and propagate the warning; 2) seek additional information/confirmation; and 3) take the prescribed action. Emergency managers can use the findings of the research to help ensure that people obtain critical information and take prescribed actions, such as evacuating a flood zone. Once the dynamics of human behavior as expressed in social media are understood, models can be built to predict human behaviors well in advance of their recommended or anticipated occurrence.

THE TYPHOON DISASTER ANALYSIS BASED ON WEIBO TOPIC HEAT

Abstract. Could social media data be utilized in hazard evaluation? Typhoon disaster as one of the costly disaster has become devastating threats for human. Moreover, social media change the communication way of human and citizens can turn to this platform to express disasterrelated information at real time. Therefore, social media improves situational awareness and widens the method of hazard information acquiring. With more and more studies investigating in relationship between social media response and degree of damage, the strong correlation has been proved. Weibo as one of the most popular social media in China can provide data with posted text, location, user identification and other additional information. Combining with 10 tropical cyclones and Weibo data in 2013, We perform a quantitative analysis between the grade of hazard situation and Weibo related topic heat in province scale. We provide a new model of Weibo topic heat to evaluate the Weibo activity in study area. Also we demonstrate the hazard assessing formula is H = 1.8845 ln(α) + 15.636 in tropical cyclone disaster. High level goodness of curve fitting also suggest that this equation can be used for rapid assessment of hazard caused by tropical cyclones.

Social media choices and uses: comparing Turkish and American young-adults\u2019 social media activism

Advocates of new media—especially social networks, blogs, and photo/content sharing sites—argue that these tools create transformative impacts on society. Recently, around the world younger activists in popular democracy movements, uprisings, and protests, feeling disengaged by traditional forms of political discourse, have debated their positions on new media, and have used digital media to communicate, organize, and coordinate protest activities. While some media scholars suggest this is an indication that young people are active in creating a public sphere constructed by social media, there is still little real-world evidence that the technological potentials are widely realized. To address this gap, this comparative case study aims to reveal how some “ordinary” young people are using social media in response to political issues, investigating: if social media create a new kind of dynamic arena for their public activism; which factors may stimulate the young to activism; and whether their motivation is powerful enough to resist the status quo. Describing and analyzing qualitative interview data from a study of Turkish students and a parallel collection of data from US students, we construct an explanation of their communicated understandings of their differences and similarities in opportunities for political actions. Our findings indicate: there are many similar technical capacities; some similar topics are seen as political; and there are different understandings of what is and is not for public discussion among their personal collections of contacts and friends, with varying levels of real-world connections. This analysis is important in terms of understanding the ways uses of media technologies may be affected by different cultures, political and social conceptualizations and online communication patterns.

Information strategies and affective reactions: How citizens interact with government social media content

As social media use grows among the general population, government organizations around the world also widely adopt the platforms. While researchers on government use of social media first acknowledged the potential of these technologies for participatory democracy, transparency, and collaboration, we have come to learn that applications such as Facebook and Twitter are also sites for misinformation and highly driven by emotional content. To better understand the information strategies of governments and how citizens react on social media, we ask the following research questions: What do government organizations post on social media? How do citizens react to the content posted by government agencies? For this study, we collected Facebook posts of local government agencies and departments across the United States and categorized each post using a framework of government communication and information strategies on social media. We then analysed differences in users’ reactions in the form of likes, comments, and shares to the distinct types of content. We wanted to capture the effects of content type on user reactions to understand what drives social media responses. We found a number of statistically significant results, providing some evidence for how different types of information affect user interaction. Our results highlight how users are more engaged by the affective and symbolic nature of social media content, rather than more serious and emotionally neutral government information. We only provide generalized evidence of how users react to U.S. local government posts on Facebook. Nevertheless, we believe this study is important for scholars of government communication and government technology adoption more broadly as it provides evidence of the affective tendencies and biases within social media environments.

The produsing expert consumer: Co-constructing, resisting and accepting health-related claims on social media in response to an infotainment show about food.

This article examines the Twitter and Facebook uptake of health messages from an infotainment TV show on food, as broadcasted on Belgium's Dutch-language public broadcaster. The interest in and amount of health-related media coverage is rising, and this media coverage is an important source of information for laypeople, and impacts their health behaviours and therapy compliance. However, the role of the audience has also changed; consumers of media content increasingly are produsers, and, in the case of health, expert consumers. To explore how current audiences react to health claims, we have conducted a quantitative and qualitative content analysis of Twitter and Facebook reactions to an infotainment show about food and nutrition. We examine (1) to which elements in the show the audience reacts, to gain insight in the traction the nutrition-related content generates and (2) whether audience members are accepting or resisting the health information in the show. Our findings show that the information on health and production elicit the most reactions, and that health information incites a lot of refutation, low acceptance and a lot of suggestions on new information or new angles to complement the show's information.

Do Football Consumers Care About Sport Governance? An Analysis of Social Media Responses to the Recent FIFA Scandal

ABSTRACTGiven the fact that the governing body of world football, FIFA, has managed to survive major failures in sports governance, this paper addresses the role of football consumers as potential principals. By characterizing FIFA as a ‘political machine’ and using ‘digital trace data’ from Twitter to analyze responses to the most recent FIFA corruption scandal, this paper introduces a new methodological approach to the realm of research on sports governance. Key events of FIFA's corruption scandal trigger significant activities, but the attention is ephemeral as it decreases over time. In addition, there is little evidence that the corruption scandal has a detrimental effect on FIFA's legitimacy among users. Ultimately, online activism striving to change FIFA's governance seems to have only rudimentarily developed and is sparsely popular among individual football fans. The paper casts further doubts on the ability of football consumers to act as effective principals in football governance.

Urban Impulses

In modeling human behavior, we expect people to make noticeable reactions to the events they witness. For people at a scheduled event like a concert or sports game, we can measure reactions by looking at geotagged social media posts. We work from a database of known events from a commercial ticket broker and a database of geotagged tweets to show how we can derive impulse response functions of tweet counts as event responses. Tweet counts typically rise in anticipation of the event and gradually fall after the event starts. We draw an analogy between evoked responses in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) from mental stimuli and social media responses from local event stimuli. Our analysis of event and tweet data shows that our derived impulse responses are statistically significant and that we can use the functions to accurately predict reactions to some event types. We give examples of impulse response functions derived from repeated events at different venues.