The effect of toxicity on COVID-19 news network formation in political subcommunities on Reddit: An affiliation network approach

Infodemic: Challenges and solutions in topic discovery and data process

BACKGROUND

The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic was a huge shock to society, and the ensuing information problems had a huge impact on society at the same time. The urgent need to understand the Infodemic, i.e., the importance of the spread of false information related to the epidemic, has been highlighted. However, while there is a growing interest in this phenomenon, studies on the topic discovery, data collection, and data preparation phases of the information analysis process have been lacking.

OBJECTIVE

Since the epidemic is unprecedented and has not ended to this day, we aimed to examine the existing Infodemic-related literature from January 2019 to December 2022.

METHODS

We have systematically searched ScienceDirect and IEEE Xplore databases with some search limitations. From the searched literature we selected titles, abstracts and keywords, and limitations sections. We conducted an extensive structured literature search and analysis by filtering the literature and sorting out the available information.

RESULTS

A total of 47 papers ended up meeting the requirements of this review. Researchers in all of these literatures encountered different challenges, most of which were focused on the data collection step, with few challenges encountered in the data preparation phase and almost none in the topic discovery section. The challenges were mainly divided into the points of how to collect data quickly, how to get the required data samples, how to filter the data, what to do if the data set is too small, how to pick the right classifier and how to deal with topic drift and diversity. In addition, researchers have proposed partial solutions to the challenges, and we have also proposed possible solutions.

CONCLUSIONS

This review found that Infodemic is a rapidly growing research area that attracts the interest of researchers from different disciplines. The number of studies in this field has increased significantly in recent years, with researchers from different countries, including the United States, India, and China. Infodemic topic discovery, data collection, and data preparation are not easy, and each step faces different challenges. While there is some research in this emerging field, there are still many challenges that need to be addressed. These findings highlight the need for more articles to address these issues and fill these gaps.

Psychometric evaluation of the Chinese version of the media Health Literacy Questionnaire: A validation study

Background

The media play an important role in health promotion and disease prevention, while at the same time, a variety of mixed health messages in the media are beginning to pose new challenges to them. However, there is a lack of media health literacy (MHL) assessment tools in China. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to translate the Media Health Literacy (MeHLit) questionnaire into Chinese and to assess its psychometric properties.

Methods

This cross-sectional study was conducted from October to December 2022, and a methodological study of the translation and validation of the MeHLit questionnaire was conducted.

Results

As a result of an extensive translation and cultural adaptation process, the final MeHLit questionnaire was developed, which includes five dimensions and 21 items. Cronbach's α value of the questionnaire was 0.859, and Cronbach's α value of the dimensions ranged from 0.776 to 0.911, which is fairly good. As a result, the test-retest reliability coefficient and the split-half reliability coefficient of the questionnaire are both equal to 0.907. Its content validity index was 0.946, suggesting a reasonable level of content validity. Through exploratory factor analysis, a five-factor structure was identified based on the eigenvalues, total variance explained, and scree plot. As a result of the validation factor analysis, all recommended fit indicators were appropriate.

Conclusion

The Chinese version of the MeHLit questionnaire has been successfully introduced in China. It has shown good psychometric properties among the Chinese public and can be used as a tool to evaluate MHL in health screening.

Evolution and differentiation of the cybersecurity communities in three social question and answer sites: A mixed-methods analysis

Cybersecurity affects us all in our daily lives. New knowledge on best practices, new vulnerabilities, and timely fixes for cybersecurity issues is growing super-linearly, and is spread across numerous, heterogeneous sources. Because of that, community contribution-based, question and answer sites have become clearinghouses for cybersecurity-related inquiries, as they have for many other topics. Historically, Stack Overflow has been the most popular platform for different kinds of technical questions, including for cybersecurity. That has been changing, however, with the advent of Security Stack Exchange, a site specifically designed for cybersecurity-related questions and answers. More recently, some cybersecurity-related subreddits of Reddit, have become hubs for cybersecurity-related questions and discussions. The availability of multiple overlapping communities has created a complex terrain to navigate for someone looking for an answer to a cybersecurity question. In this paper, we investigate how and why people choose among three prominent, overlapping, question and answer communities, for their cybersecurity knowledge needs. We aggregated data of several consecutive years of cybersecurity-related questions from Stack Overflow, Security Stack Exchange, and Reddit, and performed statistical, linguistic, and longitudinal analysis. To triangulate the results, we also conducted user surveys. We found that the user behavior across those three communities is different, in most cases. Likewise, cybersecurity-related questions asked on the three sites are different, more technical on Security Stack Exchange and Stack Overflow, and more subjective and personal on Reddit. Moreover, there appears to have been a differentiation of the communities along the same lines, accompanied by overall popularity trends suggestive of Stack Overflow's decline and Security Stack Exchange's rise within the cybersecurity community. Reddit is addressing the more subjective, discussion type needs of the lay community, and is growing rapidly.

How is COVID-19 altering the manufacturing landscape? A literature review of imminent challenges and management interventions

Disruption from the COVID-19 pandemic has caused major upheavals for manufacturing, and has severe implications for production networks, and the demand and supply chains underpinning manufacturing operations. This paper is the first of its kind to pull together research on both-the pandemic-related challenges and the management interventions in a manufacturing context. This systematic literature review reveals the frailty of supply chains and production networks in withstanding the pressures of lockdowns and other safety protocols, including product and workforce shortages. These, altogether, have led to closed facilities, reduced capacities, increased costs, and severe economic uncertainty for manufacturing businesses. In managing these challenges and stabilising their operations, manufacturers are urgently intervening by-investing in digital technologies, undertaking resource redistribution and repurposing, regionalizing and localizing, servitizing, and targeting policies that can help them survive in this altered economy. Based on holistic analysis of these challenges and interventions, this review proposes an extensive research agenda for future studies to pursue.

Adverse consequences of emotional support seeking through social network sites in coping with stress from a global pandemic

This study explores how using social networking sites (SNSs) to cope with stressors induced by a global pandemic (in this case, COVID-19) can have negative consequences. The pandemic has imposed particular stressors on individuals, such as the threats of contracting the virus and of unemployment. Owing to the lockdowns and confinements implemented to limit the spread of the pandemic, SNS use has surged worldwide. Drawing on Lazarus and Folkman’s theory of stress and coping, we consider COVID-19 obsession to be an adverse emotional response to the stressors brought about by the pandemic and emotional support seeking through SNS as a coping strategy. Furthermore, we identify SNS exhaustion as an adverse outcome of this form of coping. Finally, we analyze the intention to reduce SNS use as a corrective behavioral outcome to mitigate the negative effect of SNS-mediated coping. The findings indicate that: 1) the threat of the COVID-19 disease and the threat of unemployment drive COVID-19 obsession; 2) COVID-19 obsession contributes to emotional support seeking through SNS; 3) emotional support seeking through SNS exerts a positive effect on SNS exhaustion; 4) SNS exhaustion contributes to the intention to reduce SNS use. Our results advance Information Systems (IS) research by focusing on the use of Information Technology (IT) to cope with stressors that are essentially not IT-related; such research is largely absent from previous literature. Furthermore, our paper contributes to the increasing amount of literature on IT-mediated coping with stressors and reduced social media use.