Twitter Hashtags Research Articles

Social Dynamics and Discourse Moves: A Closer Look Into a Twitter-Facilitated Professional Learning Space.

Professionals use Twitter because of its potential to support easy and rapid communication among like-minded people. It is also used widely by educators to support the establishment of professional learning spaces. This study investigates social interactions and knowledge construction in synchronous online discussions using the Twitter hashtag #MedEdChat. Three synchronous Twitter discussions on #MedEdChat during the early part of the COVID-19 pandemic were analyzed. Social network analysis was conducted to capture the social interactions among their participants and network dynamics. Content analysis was used to examine the nature of tweets posted on #MedEdChat, including social-related, cognitive-related, and moderation-related tweets. In all three discussions, a small number of individuals dominated the interactions, while also serving as hubs for connections with others in more peripheral positions. Very few participants were isolated nodes who never interacted with others during the online discussions. Our content analysis suggested that parties to these discussions posted social-related posts the most, followed by cognitive-related ones. Social posts focused on others' messages, continuing threads, issuing compliments and greetings, and expressing emotions. Cognitive-related posts, on the other hand, mostly focused on information exchange/sharing or asking content-related questions to promote discussion (ie, triggering event). By examining social dynamics and discourse moves in Twitter-supported online synchronous discussions using the #MedEdChat hashtag, this study found that Twitter has the potential to facilitate professional learning spaces in which a few highly active individuals serve as portals for connections and interactions among all discussants. In addition, in such communities, social-related and cognitive-related tweets could promote social interactions and knowledge construction.

Cyberfeminist resistance against hegemonic and anti-feminist discourses: the case of Kuwait

ABSTRACT How do Kuwaiti cyberfeminists resist hegemonic and anti-feminist discourses? This article seeks to answer this question by exploring the contestation between Kuwaiti feminists and their Islamist opponents on Twitter. Viewing cyberfeminism as constructive resistance, I argue that feminism is practiced and performed online by a variety of women actors who do not necessarily self-identify as feminists or activists, constructively and continuously producing new discourses and subjectivities, establishing a salient embodied feminist presence that can trigger an anti-feminist counter-mobilization. In a Twitter Space hosted by the Kuwaiti Ministry of Awqaf and Islamic Affairs on December 23, 2021, an anti-feminist lecture portrayed Kuwaiti feminists as alienated from religion and society while downplaying the extent of violence against women in the country. In response, Kuwaiti cyberfeminists attempted to reclaim feminism by placing it within local and national frames using a Twitter hashtag. Resorting to a reverse discourse strategy had some shortcomings, including reinforcing hegemonic discourses and the binary of “us” (feminists) versus “them” (Islamists), which may have been an inevitable outcome of an antagonistic narrative. This article adds to the existing literature on cyberfeminism by exploring an understudied domain and offering significant insights into feminists’ online resistance in socially conservative contexts.

Exploring stroke discourse on Twitter through content and network analysis among Indian users

The study aimed to understand stroke-related Twitter conversations in India, focusing on topics, message sources, reach, and influential users to provide insights to stakeholders regarding community needs for knowledge, support, and interventions. Geo-tagged Twitter posts focusing on stroke originating from India and, spanning from November 7, 2022, to February 28, 2023, were systematically obtained via the Twitter application programming interface, using keywords and hashtags sourced through Symplur Signals. Preprocessing involved the removal of hashtags, stop words, and URLs. The Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic model was used to identify recurring stroke-related topics, while influential users were identified through social network analysis. About half of the tweets about stroke in India were about seeking support and post-stroke bereavement sharing and had the highest reachability. Four out of 10 tweets were from the individual twitter users. Tweets on the topic risk factors, awareness and prevention (14.6%) constituted the least proportion, whereas the topic management, research, and promotion had the least retweet ratio. Twitter demonstrates significant potential as a platform for both disseminating and acquiring stroke-related information within the Indian context. The identified topics and understanding of the content of discussion offer valuable resources to public health professionals and organizations to develop targeted educational and engagement strategies for the relevant audience.

The influence of Twitter hashtags in building supportive online communities for parents of children with special needs

The purpose of this research is to examine how Twitter hash tags have helped develop and maintain online groups in Saudi Arabia that provide resources and encouragement to parents of children with special needs. The research used a quantitative technique, collecting data systematically using an online survey. Participants were parents who were active members of Twitter networks devoted to helping those with disabilities. This research analyzed how often people used hashtags, the age of children with special needs, and gender affected how effective people thought Twitter hashtags were in bringing people together to help one another. According to the findings, more frequent hashtag use is correlated with a higher impression of influence. That's why it's so crucial to keep up your regular participation. Although age did not have a statistically significant effect on how influential people felt, there were clear differences between the sexes. Because of this, it's crucial to use communication methods that account for gender differences. This study contributes significantly to our understanding of the complex dynamics at play in online support groups, illuminating their inner workings and revealing insights that may be used to increase their openness and overall effectiveness. This research provides a basis for the creation and implementation of methods that will improve the efficiency with which these online communities satisfy the requirements of its members, therefore preserving their inclusive character.

Researching visual protest and politics with “extra-hard” data

A range of scholars have criticised scholarly tendencies to focus on “easy” data such as provided by the low-hanging fruit of Twitter hashtag networks (Burgess & Bruns, 2015; Hargittai, 2020; Tromble, 2021). As a result, digital social research has been said to create a glut of studies that favour particular platforms, data forms, and networking dynamics, choices that may create ‘digital bias’ (Marres, 2017). These issues are particularly significant in visual data as the implicit nature of visuality means that platform spaces, text, and networked uses of visuals contribute to how visuals are interpreted in digital environments. In response to this issue, we present and critically reflect on new potentialities in software-based visual research on protest and politics, including: (1) rich cross-project comparisons; (2) complementing platform data with on-the-ground engagement, and (3) quali-quanti visual methods. These allow for rich data journeys through multi-modality, hybridity, comprehensive data curation, reiterative image data collection and interpretation, and the inclusion of contextual reflections in focused visual research, elements that provide meaning, texture, and context (= extra-hard data). We argue that visual digital methods consequently have the potential to provide nuanced, robust, and versatile analysis of visual data, if not necessitate these in a post-API age in which easy data access is no longer a given.

An Entropic Analysis of Social Demonstrations.

Social media has dramatically influenced how individuals and groups express their demands, concerns, and aspirations during social demonstrations. The study of X or Twitter hashtags during those events has revealed the presence of some temporal points characterised by high correlation among their participants. It has also been reported that the connectivity presents a modular-to-nested transition at the point of maximum correlation. The present study aims to determine whether it is possible to characterise this transition using entropic-based tools. Our results show that entropic analysis can effectively find the transition point to the nested structure, allowing researchers to know that the transition occurs without the need for a network representation. The entropic analysis also shows that the modular-to-nested transition is characterised not by the diversity in the number of hashtags users post but by how many hashtags they share.

“I Feel Qatari Today […] I Feel Disabled Today, […] I Feel Like a Migrant Worker Today…”: On Sport, Leadership, and Moral Legitimacy

This study examines the public’s perceptions of a speech delivered by FIFA’s president in a press conference one day before the Qatar 2022 FIFA Men’s World Cup. In total, 34,714 publicly available user responses were collected from news media YouTube channels in North America, Europe, and Asia, as well as from Twitter hashtags related to the press conference. This user-generated content was analyzed using sentiment analysis to determine the degree of positivity or negativity, followed by qualitative thematic analysis to identify specific factors influencing public perceptions of Infantino’s speech, including both positive and negative aspects. The results suggested that FIFA’s communication was “debated” due to questions and challenges posed by the public. It is noted, however, that the magnitude of negative and positive evaluations varied according to the medium used and the region. Negative evaluations related to ‘hypocrisy’, ‘lack of transparency’, and ‘diplomatic hedging’, whereas positive evaluations related to ‘symbolic communication’, ‘activist governance’, and ‘cultural appropriateness’. Using the public as a resource for institutional evaluation, this research contributes to the scholarship of sport management by analyzing the impact of communication on an organization’s moral legitimacy.

Our city our crew: sense of place, cultural entrepreneurship and ‘thick’ cultural resistance in the #SaveTheCrew movement

ABSTRACT In this study, we examined the Twitter (now X, but hereafter still referred to as Twitter) hashtag #Savethecrew, a hashtag and movement created and maintained by Columbus Crew SC supporters in their attempt to prevent the relocation of their soccer team, from Columbus, Ohio, to Austin, Texas. We used two constructs – Sense of place and cultural entrepreneurship – as the basis for a critical exploration and thematic analysis. We analysed over 4000 Tweets and relevant media documents (eg local newspapers, club press statements) to explicate and frame the culturally resonant narratives and resistance strategies of Crew supporters. The case study emphasizes the ongoing importance of place and associated meanings, such as community, as strategically and culturally relevant resources that can be used to craft powerful and persuasive narratives. Ultimately, this culturally resonant narrative was used to resist ownership led activities that do not align with supporter ideals for what is best for soccer clubs and their surrounding communities.

A semi-supervised approach of short text topic modeling using embedded fuzzy clustering for Twitter hashtag recommendation

Social media stands as a crucial information source across various real-world challenges. Platforms like Twitter, extensively used by news outlets for real-time updates, categorize news via hashtags. These hashtags act as pivotal meta-information for linking tweets to underlying themes, yet many tweets lack them, posing challenges in topic searches. Our contribution addresses this by introducing a novel heuristic for hashtag recommendation. Extracting 20 thousand tweets, 5000 each from distinct categories health, sports, politics, and technology we applied fundamental data cleaning and tokenization techniques. Leveraging Word2Vec, we vectorized tokens, capturing nuanced semantic meanings and mitigating data sparsity issues. The proposed heuristic creates clusters of different topic by combining these embedded features and idea of fuzzy C-Means technique. Develop a rule-based approach that combines both supervised and unsupervised methods to label clusters, indicating their respective topic. The experimental outcomes shows that our proposed techniques achieve better performance metrics in precision, recall, and F1-score compared to specific baseline models.

Politics of phygital protests: Palestinian #GreatMarchofReturn discourse on Twitter

Twitter aids public discourse, hashtag activism and sociopolitical advocacy. In terms of Palestinian resistance discourse against Israel, the hashtag #GreatMarchofReturn represents a peaceful digital protest by the Palestinian refugees based in Gaza. We identified 13,000 tweets related to #GreatMarchofReturn, which we analysed using content analysis and descriptive analysis, followed by a visualization of the findings. We argue that hashtag activism facilitates the collective Palestinian protest discourse on Twitter about Israel’s oppressive diplomacies in Palestine. The activism endorses Palestinian nationalism and the mobilization of civilian rights. Moreover, the micro-blogging site becomes a significant platform for politicizing Israel’s punitive populism and subsequent subjugation of Palestinian refugees, especially in Gaza. The psycho-politics of phygital protests affects the socio-emotional mobilization of the Great March of Return in both virtual and physical public spheres.

Fandom image-making and the fan gaze in transnational K-pop fan cam culture

During the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement, K-pop Twitter community used fan cams as a tool to hijack racist Twitter hashtags and sought to reinvent the image of K-pop fans as progressive racism fighters. Situating the phenomenon within the fan cam's history of commercialization in South Korea reveals a transnational link between K-pop fan communities in South Korea and North America and shows how it can be related to discussions on transcultural fandom.

Affordances and platformed visual misogyny: a call for feminist approaches in visual methods

ABSTRACT With social media technologies, feminist perspectives have reached parts of society traditionally uninterested in or fundamentally opposed to them. While feminist activists and allies have employed technological affordances for support, belonging, and justice, the same tools are used by actors of the alt-right to gag feminist voices. As it circulates, anti-feminist content sustains heteropatriarchy and damages women beyond the symbolic by means of trolling, doxxing, and meme wars. We address this through a review of feminist visual methods applied to the analysis of imaginaries of digital gendered hate in four case studies: (1) Greta Thunberg memes in the DENY Facebook group; (2) “Fanquan Girls” meme wars in the Hong Kong Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement; (3) visual artefacts shared under the Twitter hashtag #SisterIDoBelieveYou; and (4) cartoons of Grace Mugabe relating to presidential succession produced in seven African countries. By reflecting on the ethos behind these four cases, we identify specific benefits to be gained from working with feminist visual methods, and contour a novel phenomenon: platformed visual misogyny.

“Come for the Memes, Stay for Defending the Faith”: Far-Right and Anti-Feminist Red Pill Influences in the #DezNat Twitter Hashtag

Scholarship on the intersection of Mormonism and the internet has often focused on progressive online voices. However, in recent years, the DezNat movement has challenged the assumption that online Mormonism necessarily trends more liberal than the Latter-day Saint mainstream. In this study, we examine the influence of red pill communities—which include far-right and anti-feminist movements on the internet—on DezNat. We collected 1,378 screenshots of tweets containing the #DezNat hashtag (which often included additional data and context) and engaged in open coding of these tweets, guided by our understanding of red pill concepts and tropes. We found considerable evidence of far-right and anti-feminist influences on DezNat-tagged tweets, suggesting that it is disingenuous for DezNat defenders to describe the movement as merely about Latter-day Saint orthodoxy. However, interpreting our findings through an affinity space framework, we argue that it is impractical—and perhaps impossible—to definitively establish the motivations of all those who participate in the movement. Rather, we suggest that the clear red pill references by DezNat participants provide an opportunity to consider overlaps between Mormonism, the far right, and aggressive anti-feminism—as well as the tensions between intentional ambiguity and boundary maintenance in Latter-day Saint institutions.

Cultural Genocide, Mass Immigration, and the Kalergi Plan: Conceptualizations of Race in White Identity Politics Online

This study aims to clarify ambiguities surrounding the understanding of race in white identity politics and how these ambiguities are reflected in online discourse. Grounded in the framework of critical race studies, we constructed a comprehensive race typology that we used to unpack the multifaceted conceptions of race in digital discourse on Twitter. Using a combination of Tableau, NVivo, and manual coding, we examined the prevalence of four conceptualizations of race (Biological, Cultural, Nationalist, and Pan-Nationalist) in data collected from three Twitter hashtags (#whitegenocide, #kalergiplan, and #antiwhite). We conclude that race does not stand out as one coherent system in the analyzed data but as an amalgam of divergent racial interpretations. Notably, the Cultural conceptualization of race is the most predominant, followed closely by the Pan-Nationalist perspective of white identity. Our investigation also explores the palpable anxiety surrounding the perceived erosion of the white race within white identity politics. This apprehension is prominently articulated as "white grievances" and through a gendered understanding wherein white women assume a pivotal role in both propagating the white race and in acting as a vulnerable "access point" within the white racial framework.

Redes sociales y cirugía

During the last years, social media use has increased in the surgical community. Social media in surgery has created new challenges such as surgical education, patient privacy, professionalism, and the difference between the private and public virtual life. Facebook, YouTube or WebSurg are some of the main social media in the surgical field. Nevertheless, Twitter is the most common and relevant media for surgeons. Some Twitter Hashtag such as #SoMe4Surgery or #colorectalsurgery went viral and had a significant influence in the surgical community. Some of the uses of social media in surgery are education of younger surgeons, surgical research, and relationship between surgeons. However, not everything in social media is positive. Some negative issues of social media use in surgery are, for example, lack of privacy, intellectual property conflicts, conflicts of interest and mistakes in the published information. In this article, the main social media, the use of these media, the advantages and the possible risks and negative issues of social media are discussed.

Image networks and practice analysis of larger data corpora. An approach to cluster and recontextualize visual practice in social media

This paper reports a methodological exploration combining image network analysis and standardized practice analysis on social media data. Through applying the open source software Memespector to access the Clarifai API, the potential of an easy-at-hand image tagging tool as an instrument to manage larger data corpora is explored. Using the example of the German-speaking Twitter hashtag #systemrelevant, we relate image clusters to the results of standardized practice analysis of posts that contain images. The proposed method is intended for research that attempts to carve out the co-constituting of public discourse in social media by different groups of actors. The approach systematically differentiates the contributions of societal groups such as journalism, civil society, or private individuals, and the embedding of their tweets in selected anchoring practices and further modalities of participation. Altogether, the multistep analytical process offers a possible approach to process larger image corpora, while maintaining a sensitivity for the practice-theoretical demand of (re)contextualizing image use.

“The Most Important Shot You Will Ever Take”: The Burgeoning Role of Social Media Activism in Challenging Embedded NCAA Patriarchy

While the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s (NCAA) purpose is to protect college athletes within a hypercommercialized institutional setting, the protections prevent college athletes from accessing the lucrative marketplace. Extant literature has conceptualized the operating functions of the NCAA within the context of a patriarchal framework in which college athletes are infantilized, and authoritative institutional control is thereby justified. However, social media has provided a platform to engage in counter-storytelling and activism. As such, this study examined engagement with college-athlete-led social media activism. Utilizing a content-analysis methodological approach, social media engagement with the Twitter hashtag #NotNCAAProperty was examined over the course of the 2021 NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament. Findings revealed that most interactions were supportive of college athletes and suggest that social media may be a strategic mechanism for college athletes to engage in advocacy initiatives.

Social media and surgery

During the last years, social media use has increased in the surgical community. Social Media in surgery has created new challenges such as surgical education, patient privacy, professionalism, and the difference between the private and public virtual life. Facebook, YouTube or WebSurg are some of the main social media in the surgical field. Nevertheless, Twitter is the most common and relevant Media for surgeons. Some Twitter Hashtag such as #SoMe4Surgery or #colorectalsurgery went viral and had a significant influence in the surgical community. Some of the uses of social media in surgery are education of younger surgeons, surgical research, and relationship between surgeons. However, not everything in social media is positive. Some negative issues of social media use in surgery are, for example, lack of privacy, intellectual property conflicts, conflicts of interest and mistakes in the published information. In this article, the main social media, the use of these media, the advantages and the possible risks and negative issues of social media are discussed.

Patient safety discourse in a pandemic: a Twitter hashtag analysis study on #PatientSafety.

The digitalization of medicine is becoming a transformative force in modern healthcare systems. This study aims to investigate discussions regarding patient safety, as well as summarize perceived approaches to mitigating risks of adverse events expressed through the #PatientSafety Twitter hashtag during the COVID-19 pandemic. This research is grounded in the analysis of data extracted from Twitter under the hashtag #PatientSafety between December 1, 2019 and February 1, 2023. Symplur Signals, which represents a tool offering a method to monitor tweets containing hashtags registered with the Symplur Healthcare Hashtag Project, was used for analyzing the tweets shared in the study period. For text analytics of the relevant data, we further used the word cloud generator MonkeyLearn, and VOSviewer. The analysis encompasses 358'809 tweets that were shared by 90'079 Twitter users, generating a total of 1'183'384'757 impressions. Physicians contributed to 18.65% of all tweets, followed by other healthcare professionals (14.31%), and health-focused individuals (10.91%). Geographically, more than a third of tweets (60.90%) were published in the United States. Canada and India followed in second and third positions, respectively. Blocks of trending terms of greater interest to the global Twitter community within the hashtag #PatientSafety were determined to be: "Patient," "Practical doctors," and "Health Care Safety Management." The findings demonstrate the engagement of the Twitter community with COVID-19 and problems related to the training, experience of doctors and patients during a pandemic, communication, the vaccine safety and effectiveness, and potential use of off-label drugs. Noteworthy, in the field of pharmacovigilance, Twitter has the possibility of identifying adverse reactions associated with the use of drugs, including vaccines. The issue of medical errors has been also discussed by Twitter users using the hashtag #PatientSafety. It is clear that various stakeholders, including students, medical practitioners, health organizations, pharmaceutical companies, and regulatory bodies, leverage Twitter to rapidly exchange medical information, data on the disease symptoms, and the drug effects. Consequently, there is a need to further integrate Twitter-derived data into the operational routines of healthcare organizations.

Network analysis of the social media activities around the #TeleCheckAF project.

TeleCheck-AF is a novel remote on-demand mobile health infrastructure around teleconsultations for patients with atrial fibrillation. Social media (SoMe) communication on Twitter contributed to the dissemination of this healthcare innovation by using the hashtag #TeleCheckAF. This study aims to analyse the SoMe network behind #TeleCheckAF and determine the key opinion leaders. Publicly available data on actors and interactions around the hashtag #TeleCheckAF were collected by web scraping from the platform Twitter. With tools based on social network analysis, a social network was created, different communities were identified, and key opinion leaders were determined by their centrality in the network. The SoMe network consisted of 413 086 accounts with 636 502 ties in 22 different communities. A total of 287 accounts that diffused information and/or used the TeleCheck-AF infrastructure were analysed in depth. Those accounts involved users from >15 different countries and multidisciplinary professions. Further, 20 opinion leaders were identified, including four official accounts of societies and associated journals among key opinion leaders. Peaks in #TeleCheckAF tweets were seen after (virtual) conferences and other activities involving national and international cardiology societies. Social network analysis of the TeleCheck-AF Twitter hashtag revealed a wide, multidisciplinary potential reach for the diffusion of a healthcare innovation. Official society SoMe accounts can amplify the dissemination of research findings by featuring abstract presentations during conferences and published manuscripts. This underlines the synergistic effects between traditional and SoMe-based research dissemination strategies for novel healthcare approaches, such as the TeleCheck-AF project.