Proceedings of the ... International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media. International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media最新文献

Ask the Doctor (AtD) services provide patients the opportunity to seek medical advice using online platforms. While these services represent a new mode of healthcare delivery, study of these online health communities and how they are used is limited. In particular, it is unknown if these platforms replicate existing barriers and biases in traditional healthcare delivery across demographic groups. We present an analysis of AskDocs, a subreddit that functions as a public AtD platform on social media. We examine the demographics of users, the health topics discussed, if biases present in offline healthcare settings exist on this platform, and how empathy is expressed in interactions between users and physicians. Our findings suggest a number of implications to enhance and support peer-to-peer and patient-provider interactions on online platforms.

Understanding the effects of psychiatric medications during mental health treatment constitutes an active area of inquiry. While clinical trials help evaluate the effects of these medications, many trials suffer from a lack of generalizability to broader populations. We leverage social media data to examine psychopathological effects subject to self-reported usage of psychiatric medication. Using a list of common approved and regulated psychiatric drugs and a Twitter dataset of 300M posts from 30K individuals, we develop machine learning models to first assess effects relating to mood, cognition, depression, anxiety, psychosis, and suicidal ideation. Then, based on a stratified propensity score based causal analysis, we observe that use of specific drugs are associated with characteristic changes in an individual's psychopathology. We situate these observations in the psychiatry literature, with a deeper analysis of pre-treatment cues that predict treatment outcomes. Our work bears potential to inspire novel clinical investigations and to build tools for digital therapeutics.

Student deaths on college campuses, whether brought about by a suicide or an uncontrollable incident, have serious repercussions for the mental wellbeing of students. Consequently, many campus administrators implement post-crisis intervention measures to promote student-centric mental health support. Information about these measures, which we refer to as "counseling recommendations", are often shared via electronic channels, including social media. However, the current ability to assess the effects of these recommendations on post-crisis psychological states is limited. We propose a causal analysis framework to examine the effects of these counseling recommendations after student deaths. We leverage a dataset from 174 Reddit campus communities and ~400M posts of ~350K users. Then we employ statistical modeling and natural language analysis to quantify the psychosocial shifts in behavioral, cognitive, and affective expression of grief in individuals who are "exposed" to (comment on) the counseling recommendations, compared to that in a matched control cohort. Drawing on crisis and psychology research, we find that the exposed individuals show greater grief, psycholinguistic, and social expressiveness, providing evidence of a healing response to crisis and thereby positive psychological effects of the counseling recommendations. We discuss the implications of our work in supporting post-crisis rehabilitation and intervention efforts on college campuses.

Increasing incidence of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) has prompted the public health and technology communities to innovate new measures to understand how individuals use Internet resources to attain relevant information, particularly for sensitive or stigmatized conditions. The purpose of this study is to examine recent health information seeking and needs of the r/STD community, a subreddit focused exclusively on STDs. We found that the majority of posts crowd-source information about intermediate, non-reportable STDs such as human papillomavirus (HPV). Crowdsourced information in this community focused on symptoms, treatment, as well as the social and emotional aspects of sexual health such as fear of misdiagnosis. From our analysis, it is clear that online communities focused on discussion of health symptoms have the ripe potential to influence information-seeking behavior and consumer action.

Loyalty is an essential component of multi-community engagement. When users have the choice to engage with a variety of different communities, they often become loyal to just one, focusing on that community at the expense of others. However, it is unclear how loyalty is manifested in user behavior, or whether certain community characteristics encourage loyalty. In this paper we operationalize loyalty as a user-community relation: users loyal to a community consistently prefer it over all others; loyal communities retain their loyal users over time. By exploring a large set of Reddit communities, we reveal that loyalty is manifested in remarkably consistent behaviors. Loyal users employ language that signals collective identity and engage with more esoteric, less popular content, indicating that they may play a curational role in surfacing new material. Loyal communities have denser user-user interaction networks and lower rates of triadic closure, suggesting that community-level loyalty is associated with more cohesive interactions and less fragmentation into subgroups. We exploit these general patterns to predict future rates of loyalty. Our results show that a user's propensity to become loyal is apparent from their initial interactions with a community, suggesting that some users are intrinsically loyal from the very beginning.