BACKGROUND Social media is increasingly being used by young people for health-related issues, including communicating about suicide. Due to the concerns about causing distress or inducing suicidal thoughts or behaviors, to date young people neither have been engaged in the development of social media-based suicide prevention interventions nor have interventions focused on educating young people...

The world of communication has changed significantly in the last decade as a result of the evolution of social media. Food crisis managers and communicators should be cognizant of the messages presented to the public by all media channels during a crisis. Using the 2008 Irish dioxin contamination incident as an example, a quantitative content analysis was carried out to investigate the relation...

Background Recently, there has been a fast growth in the use of different kind of media especially in adolescents. Media literacy education is supported by numerous national organizations and institute as a potential tool to decrease negative media effects and to increase desirable use of media. However, there are little documents about their effects. This study was conducted to investigate the...

Early detection of suicidal thoughts is an important part of effective suicide prevention. Such thoughts may be expressed online, especially by young people. This paper presents on-going work on the automatic recognition of suicidal messages in social media. We present experiments for automatically detecting relevant messages (with suicide-related content), and those containing suicide threats....

In social media, mainly due to length constraints, users write succinct messages and use hashtags to refer to entities, events, sentiments or ideas. Hashtags carry a lot of content that can help in many tasks and applications involving text processing such as sentiment analysis, named entity recognition and information extraction. However, identifying the individual words of a hashtag is not tr...

Television shows are now instigating online social interactions between viewers by requesting viewers, as part of the first broadcasts, to participate in simultaneous discussions about shows. In this work, we analyze and quantify the effect of strategies used in an American reality singing show to engage viewers. We show three main results: 1) when specific tweet messages are posted on the TV s...

Social media provides a platform for dissatisfied and frustrated customers to discuss matters of common concerns and share experiences about products and services. While listening to and learning from customer has long been recognized as an important marketing charge, how to identify customer complaints on social media is a nontrivial task. Customer complaint messages are highly distributed on ...

Dynamic social media content, such as Twitter messages, can be used to examine individuals' beliefs and perceptions. By analyzing Twitter messages, this study examines how Twitter users exchanged and recognized toponyms (city names) for different cities in the United States. The frequency and variety of city names found in their online conversations were used to identify the unique spatiotempor...

BACKGROUND Nigeria has the highest population in sub-Saharan Africa with high birth and growth rates. There is therefore need for family planning to regulate and stabilize this population. This study examined the relationship between access to mass media messages on family planning and use of family planning in Nigeria. It also investigated the impacts of spatio-demographic variables on the rel...

There has been limited previous research that has examined the role of sociocultural influences on body change strategies among adult men. The current study investigated the role of specific types of messages (encouragement, teasing and modelling) from peers and the media on the strategies to change weight among adult men. Differences were evaluated between 526 men aged from 18 to 60 years from...