Background: Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, social media has served as a channel of communication, a venue for entertainment, and a mechanism for information dissemination.
Objective: This study aims to assess the associations between social media use patterns; demographics; and knowledge, perceptions, and self-reported adherence toward COVID-19 prevention guidelines, due to growing and evolving social media use.
Methods: Quota-sampled data were collected through a web-based survey of US adults through the Qualtrics platform, from March 15, 2022, to March 23, 2022, to assess covariates (eg, demographics, vaccination, and political affiliation), frequency of social media use, social media sources of COVID-19 information, as well as knowledge, perceptions, and self-reported adherence toward COVID-19 prevention guidelines. Three linear regression models were used for data analysis.
Results: A total of 1043 participants responded to the survey, with an average age of 45.3 years, among which 49.61% (n=515) of participants were men, 66.79% (n=696) were White, 11.61% (n=121) were Black or African American, 13.15% (n=137) were Hispanic or Latino, 37.71% (n=382) were Democrat, 30.21% (n=306) were Republican, and 25% (n=260) were not vaccinated. After controlling for covariates, users of TikTok (β=-.29, 95% CI -0.58 to -0.004; P=.047) were associated with lower knowledge of COVID-19 guidelines, users of Instagram (β=-.40, 95% CI -0.68 to -0.12; P=.005) and Twitter (β=-.33, 95% CI -0.58 to -0.08; P=.01) were associated with perceiving guidelines as strict, and users of Facebook (β=-.23, 95% CI -0.42 to -0.043; P=.02) and TikTok (β=-.25, 95% CI -0.5 to -0.009; P=.04) were associated with lower adherence to the guidelines (R 0.06-0.23).
Conclusions: These results allude to the complex interactions between online and physical environments. Future interventions should be tailored to subpopulations based on their demographics and social media site use. Efforts to mitigate misinformation and implement digital public health policy must account for the impact of the digital landscape on knowledge, perceptions, and level of adherence toward prevention guidelines for effective pandemic control.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.2196/44395 | DOI Listing |
Acta Med Philipp
December 2024
Institute of Human Genetics, National Institutes of Health, University of the Philippines Manila.
Background: As social media continue to grow as popular and convenient tools for acquiring and disseminating health information, the need to investigate its utilization by laypersons encountering common medical issues becomes increasingly essential.
Objectives: This study aimed to analyze the content posted in Facebook groups for Glucose-6-Phosphate Dehydrogenase (G6PD) deficiency and how these engage the members of the group.
Methods: This study employed an inductive content analysis of user-posted content in both public and private Facebook groups catering specifically to G6PD deficiency.
Prev Med Rep
January 2025
One Health Research Group, Faculty of Medicine, Universidad de las Américas, Quito, Ecuador.
Background: Electronic cigarettes, introduced as a safer tobacco alternative, have unintentionally exposed millions of youths to nicotine and harmful chemicals. Adolescence, a key period for forming lifelong habits, has seen rising e-cigarette use, particularly in developing regions like Latin America, warranting thorough investigation.
Objective: To describe the prevalence and factors associated with e-cigarette use among adolescents in Latin America.
Healthc Technol Lett
January 2025
This study aimed to develop an advanced ensemble approach for automated classification of mental health disorders in social media posts. The research question was: can an ensemble of fine-tuned transformer models (XLNet, RoBERTa, and ELECTRA) with Bayesian hyperparameter optimization improve the accuracy of mental health disorder classification in social media text. Three transformer models (XLNet, RoBERTa, and ELECTRA) were fine-tuned on a dataset of social media posts labelled with 15 distinct mental health disorders.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFront Child Adolesc Psychiatry
April 2024
New York State Psychiatric Institute and Department of Psychiatry, Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians & Surgeons, New York, NY, United States.
Background: Depression is a major public health concern for adolescents, who exhibit low rates of connection to care despite significant needs. Although barriers to help-seeking such as stigma are well documented, interventions to address stigma and to increase help-seeking behavior are insufficient. Dissemination of short videos in social media offer a promising approach, but designing effective stimuli requires better insight into adolescents' perspectives of their own experiences, barriers, and possible interventions.
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