Discourse, Health and Well-Being of Military Populations Through the Social Media Lens

Social media can provide a resource for characterizing communities and small populations through activities and content shared online. For instance, studying the language use in social media within military populations may provide insights into their health and well-being. In this paper, we address three research questions: (1) How do military populations use social media? (2) What do military users discuss in social media? And (3) Do military users talk about health and well-being differently than civilians? Military Twitter users were identified through keywords in the profile description of users who posted geo-tagged tweets at military installations. The data was anonymized for the analysis. User tweets that belong to military populations were compared to non-military populations. Our results indicate that military users talk more about events in their military life, whereas non-military users talk more about school, work, and leisure activities. Additionally, we identified significant differences in communication behavior between two populations, including health-related