Understanding international perceptions of the severity of harmful content online.
Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Jiang JA
PROVIDER: S-EPMC8396792 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:BackgroundGiven the variation in human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine coverage across Canada, and debate regarding delivery of HPV vaccines in Catholic schools, we studied online comments on Canadian news websites to understand public perceptions of HPV and HPV vaccine.MethodsWe searched English- and French-language Canadian news websites for 2012 articles that contained the terms "HPV" or "human papillomavirus." Articles about HPV vaccinations that contained at least one comment were included. Two researchers independently coded comments, analyzing them for emerging themes.ResultsWe identified 3073 comments from 1198 individuals in response to 71 news articles; 630 (52.6%) individuals expressed positive sentiments about HPV vaccination (2.5 comments/individual), 404 (33.7%) were negative (3.0 comments/individual), 34 (2.8%) were mixed (1.5 comments/individual) and 130 (10.8%) were neutral (1.6 comments/individual). Vaccine-supportive commenters believed the vaccine is safe and effective. Common themes in negative comments included concerns regarding HPV vaccine safety and efficacy, distrust of pharmaceutical companies and government, and belief that school-age children are too young for HPV vaccine. Many comments focused on whether the Catholic Church has the right to inform health policy for students, and discussion often evolved into debates regarding HPV and sexual behaviour. We noted that many individuals doubted the credibility of vaccine safety information.ConclusionThe majority of commenters do not appear to be against HPV vaccination, but public health messaging that focuses on both the vaccine's safety profile, and its use as a means to prevent cancer rather than sexually transmitted HPV infection may facilitate its acceptance.
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Project description:Background Gaucher disease is a rare, autosomal recessive genetic disorder. It is caused by a lack of sufficient activity of the lysosomal enzyme known as glucocerebrosidase, which leads to an accumulation of glucocerebroside, a fatty substance, in the spleen, liver, bone marrow, and rarely, the lungs or central nervous system. While there are several treatments available for people with Type 1 Gaucher disease and the visceral aspects of Type 3 Gaucher disease, no cure is present for any type of Gaucher disease. Clinical trials are currently underway to investigate the safety and efficacy of gene therapy in Gaucher disease, which has the potential to become a new type of (curative) treatment in the future. Gene therapy is a relatively new therapeutic approach, and with the desire to keep the community informed about new treatment developments, the International Gaucher Alliance (IGA) set-up a Gaucher disease specific survey to gauge current perceptions. The survey aimed to benchmark understanding of, and the educational needs surrounding, gene therapy among the Gaucher disease community. Body An international, online survey was developed, comprising twelve questions ranging from multiple choice, Likert scale, single tick-box, ranking and open questions. The survey was developed following three patient and caregiver focus groups and underwent review from members of the IGA for readability and accuracy before going live to respondents. The survey was available for two months and shared to audiences via specific Gaucher community channels. Conclusion Over 100 patients and parents/caregivers from the Gaucher disease community completed the survey, including people living with Type 1 Gaucher disease (52.88%), people living with Type 3 Gaucher disease (3.85%), parents/caregivers of people living with Type 1, 2 or 3 Gaucher disease (39.42%), and other (3.85%) who were defined as parents of multiple people with Gaucher disease. The survey uncovered various commonalities in perception of gene therapy among all groups, with large knowledge gaps identified on the mode of action, the usefulness of gene therapy and overall understanding of the therapeutic area. This survey provides an overview of the type of information that could be valuable to the Gaucher disease community when developing educational materials. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s13023-022-02576-3.
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Project description:Most prevention efforts focus on promoting services (e.g. vaccination, screening tests). While some of these services have clear net benefit, many instead have possible or clear net harm. Currently, three quarters of services graded by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) have possible or clear net harm (C, I, and D services). Many of these services are delivered in healthcare settings at higher rates than what might be expected based on their potential for harm. This leads to adverse outcomes, excess costs, and missed opportunities to deliver more quality care. An important issue in delivering prevention messages is how to shift toward a focus on the appropriateness of prevention: encouraging services with clear net benefit and either discouraging or reducing demand for services with possible or clear net harm. Unfortunately, little is known about what drives overuse of potentially harmful screening services or how to make harms relevant to patients.
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Project description:In online content moderation, two key values may come into conflict: protecting freedom of expression and preventing harm. Robust rules based in part on how citizens think about these moral dilemmas are necessary to deal with this conflict in a principled way, yet little is known about people's judgments and preferences around content moderation. We examined such moral dilemmas in a conjoint survey experiment where US respondents (N = 2, 564) indicated whether they would remove problematic social media posts on election denial, antivaccination, Holocaust denial, and climate change denial and whether they would take punitive action against the accounts. Respondents were shown key information about the user and their post as well as the consequences of the misinformation. The majority preferred quashing harmful misinformation over protecting free speech. Respondents were more reluctant to suspend accounts than to remove posts and more likely to do either if the harmful consequences of the misinformation were severe or if sharing it was a repeated offense. Features related to the account itself (the person behind the account, their partisanship, and number of followers) had little to no effect on respondents' decisions. Content moderation of harmful misinformation was a partisan issue: Across all four scenarios, Republicans were consistently less willing than Democrats or independents to remove posts or penalize the accounts that posted them. Our results can inform the design of transparent rules for content moderation of harmful misinformation.
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Project description:PurposeWe aimed to better understand hesitancy to use nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) to quit smoking.DesignWe content coded and analyzed NRT-related posts in online quit smoking support groups to understand NRT-use hesitancy and to examine associations with health outcomes.SettingNRT posts were analyzed in unmoderated social-media support groups with free NRT.SampleAdults who smoked daily (n = 438) and posted about NRT were studied, 339 of whom reported on NRT usage and 403 reported on smoking abstinence.MeasuresSurveys at 1-month post-quit date assessed NRT usage and smoking abstinence.AnalysisRelationships among NRT posts, NRT usage and smoking abstinence were analyzed using GEE models accounting for support group and covariates.ResultsNearly all (96.17%) participants reported using the study-provided NRT once, most (70.21%) used NRT during the past week, but less than half (45.72%) used NRT daily for the full month as recommended. Nearly two-thirds (65.34%) of NRT posts were negative. Posts reflecting dislike or no longer needing NRT were associated with a lower likelihood of using NRT in the past week at least once (B = -.66, P = .005 and B = -.37, P = .045), use occasions (B = -1.86, P = .018 and B = -1.10, P = .016) and used daily for full month (B = -.56, P = .044 and B = -.53, P = .009). Posts related to the effectiveness of NRT related to past-week NRT used at least once (B = .15, P = .023), used daily for full month (B = .25, P = .001), and smoking abstinence (B = .27, P = .002).ConclusionStrategies are needed to address dislike of NRT and strengthen perceptions of NRT efficacy, especially on social media where posts may be amplified.
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Project description:BackgroundResearch has repeatedly shown that exposure to suicide-related news media content is associated with suicide rates, with some content characteristics likely having harmful and others potentially protective effects. Although good evidence exists for a few selected characteristics, systematic and large-scale investigations are lacking. Moreover, the growing importance of social media, particularly among young adults, calls for studies on the effects of the content posted on these platforms.ObjectiveThis study applies natural language processing and machine learning methods to classify large quantities of social media data according to characteristics identified as potentially harmful or beneficial in media effects research on suicide and prevention.MethodsWe manually labeled 3202 English tweets using a novel annotation scheme that classifies suicide-related tweets into 12 categories. Based on these categories, we trained a benchmark of machine learning models for a multiclass and a binary classification task. As models, we included a majority classifier, an approach based on word frequency (term frequency-inverse document frequency with a linear support vector machine) and 2 state-of-the-art deep learning models (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers [BERT] and XLNet). The first task classified posts into 6 main content categories, which are particularly relevant for suicide prevention based on previous evidence. These included personal stories of either suicidal ideation and attempts or coping and recovery, calls for action intending to spread either problem awareness or prevention-related information, reporting of suicide cases, and other tweets irrelevant to these 5 categories. The second classification task was binary and separated posts in the 11 categories referring to actual suicide from posts in the off-topic category, which use suicide-related terms in another meaning or context.ResultsIn both tasks, the performance of the 2 deep learning models was very similar and better than that of the majority or the word frequency classifier. BERT and XLNet reached accuracy scores above 73% on average across the 6 main categories in the test set and F1-scores between 0.69 and 0.85 for all but the suicidal ideation and attempts category (F1=0.55). In the binary classification task, they correctly labeled around 88% of the tweets as about suicide versus off-topic, with BERT achieving F1-scores of 0.93 and 0.74, respectively. These classification performances were similar to human performance in most cases and were comparable with state-of-the-art models on similar tasks.ConclusionsThe achieved performance scores highlight machine learning as a useful tool for media effects research on suicide. The clear advantage of BERT and XLNet suggests that there is crucial information about meaning in the context of words beyond mere word frequencies in tweets about suicide. By making data labeling more efficient, this work has enabled large-scale investigations on harmful and protective associations of social media content with suicide rates and help-seeking behavior.
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Project description:The lack of knowledge by health professionals in the management of scoliosis can lead to an erroneous diagnosis. The aim of the current study was to understand the influence of length of professional experience on the knowledge of Brazilian physical therapists regarding international guidelines for the treatment of adolescent idiopathic scoliosis. The study was conducted using an online questionnaire consisting of 23 questions, divided into 8 questions on sociodemographic data and 15 questions based on information provided by the guidelines in the SOSORT 2016. In total, 506 physiotherapists were interviewed, and they comprised the study sample. The results showed that professionals who have been working for more than 6 years in the field have greater knowledge of AIS, seek to become more professional, and with that, have an understanding of AIS that is more aligned with the SOSORT. Length of experience made a difference when considering knowledge of the treatment of idiopathic scoliosis. The present study showed that a time since graduation of 6 years or more was satisfactory.
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