Social media and online hate.

Social media host alarming degrees of hate messages directed at individuals and groups, threatening victims' psychological and physical well-being. Traditional approaches to online hate often focus on perpetrators' traits and their attitudes toward their targets. Such approaches neglect the social and interpersonal dynamics that social media afford by which individuals glean social approval from like-minded friends.

Evaluating Health Advice in a Web 2.0 Environment: The Impact of Multiple User-Generated Factors on HIV Advice Perceptions.

Unlike traditional media, social media systems often present information of different types from different kinds of contributors within a single message pane, a juxtaposition of potential influences that challenges traditional health communication processing. One type of social media system, question-and-answer advice systems, provides peers' answers to health-related questions, which yet other peers read and rate. Responses may appear good or bad, responders may claim expertise, and others' aggregated evaluations of an answer's usefulness may affect readers' judgments.

Media Effects: Theory and Research.

This review analyzes trends and commonalities among prominent theories of media effects. On the basis of exemplary meta-analyses of media effects and bibliometric studies of well-cited theories, we identify and discuss five features of media effects theories as well as their empirical support. Each of these features specifies the conditions under which media may produce effects on certain types of individuals.

Supporting tobacco control: stimulating local newspaper coverage with a technical assistance website for local coalitions.

A large and growing literature confirms that well-designed web-based programs can be effective in preventing or treating several chronic diseases. This study examined how the Internet can deliver information and train community activists and specifically tested the effects of web-based technical assistance on local tobacco control coalitions' efforts to use media advocacy to advance their agendas. The authors compared a highly interactive, Enhanced website (intervention) to a noninteractive, Basic text-based website (comparison) in Colorado communities.

Continued benefits of a technical assistance web site to local tobacco control coalitions during a state budget shortfall.

Context: A state budget shortfall defunded 10 local tobacco coalitions during a randomized trial but defunded coalitions continued to have access to 2 technical assistance Web sites.

Objective: To test the ability of Web-based technology to provide technical assistance to local tobacco control coalitions.

Design: Randomized 2-group trial with local tobacco control coalitions as the unit of randomization.

Health information, credibility, homophily, and influence via the Internet: Web sites versus discussion groups.

Despite concerns about online health information and efforts to improve its credibility, how users evaluate and utilize such information presented in Web sites and online discussion groups may involve different evaluative mechanisms. This study examined credibility and homophily as two underlying mechanisms for social influence with regard to online health information. An original experiment detected that homophily grounded credibility perceptions and drove the persuasive process in both Web sites and online discussion groups.

Attributes of interactive online health information systems.

The development of online communication systems related to prevention, decision making, and coping with cancer has outpaced theoretical attention to the attributes that appeal to system users and that create effective interactions. This essay reviews a number of sociotechnical attributes related to online discussion systems and tutorials, including interactivity, presence, homophily, social distance, anonymity/privacy, and interaction management. These attributes are derived from different theoretical perspectives which have led to clinical trials and other empirical studies demonstrating effectiveness or attraction to end users.

Research ethics in Internet-enabled research: human subjects issues and methodological myopia.

As Internet resources are used more frequently for research on social and psychological behavior, concerns grow about whether characteristics of such research affect human subjects protections. Early efforts to address such concerns have done more to identify potential problems than to evaluate them or to seek solutions, leaving bodies charged with human subjects oversight in a quagmire. This article critiques some of these issues in light of the US Code of Federal Regulations' policies for the Protection of Human Subjects, and argues that some of the issues have no pertinence when examined in the context of common methodological approaches that previous commentators failed to consider.

The effect of top-level domains and advertisements on health web-site credibility.

Background: Concerns over health information on the Internet have generated efforts to enhance credibility markers; yet how users actually assess the credibility of online health information is largely unknown.

Objective: This study set out to (1) establish a parsimonious and valid questionnaire instrument to measure credibility of Internet health information by drawing on various previous measures of source, news, and other credibility scales; and (2) to identify the effects of Web-site domains and advertising on credibility perceptions.

Methods: Respondents (N = 156) examined one of 12 Web-site mock-ups and completed credibility scales in a 3 x 2 x 2 between-subjects experimental design.