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Digital inclusion: A mixed-method study of user behavior and content on Twitter

OBJECTIVE: This study is the first to explore user behavior and characterize the content shared about digital inclusion on Twitter. METHODS: This mixed-methods research consists of 14,000 tweets featuring the hashtag “#digitalinclusion,” posted on Twitter over 15 months. A machine learning technique...

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Autor principal: Salzmann-Erikson, Martin
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: SAGE Publications 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10621295/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37928325
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/20552076231211277
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author Salzmann-Erikson, Martin
author_facet Salzmann-Erikson, Martin
author_sort Salzmann-Erikson, Martin
collection PubMed
description OBJECTIVE: This study is the first to explore user behavior and characterize the content shared about digital inclusion on Twitter. METHODS: This mixed-methods research consists of 14,000 tweets featuring the hashtag “#digitalinclusion,” posted on Twitter over 15 months. A machine learning technique, latent Dirichlet allocation, was utilized to discover abstract topics within the tweets statistically. The algorithm identified important keywords and text associated with each topic by modeling the underlying word co-occurrence patterns in the dataset. A manual qualitative content analysis was applied to the qualitative data (1000 tweets). RESULTS: Tweets containing #digitalinclusion are driven by four motives: 1) warning against the risks of digital exclusion; 2) tweets that promote actions to increase digital inclusion; 3) tweets that call for others to take action to improve digitalization; and 4) tweets that are neutral but fuel the debate by being active. Quantitative analysis revealed that users discussing digital inclusion come from various continents, including the USA, Europe, Africa, and Asia. There were 3931 unique user accounts, with individuals posting between one and 368 tweets. Approximately half of the tweets contained some embedded media. CONCLUSION: The study concludes that digital inclusion is a subject that engages Twitter users worldwide. Tweets that were associated with community and local initiatives and sustainable development had the highest engagement in terms of the number of retweets and likes. The interpretation is that digital inclusion is crucial for achieving equity in living conditions and enhancing access to health information and services. While initiatives to increase digital inclusion are underway, Twitter users call for more efforts to prevent growing digital exclusion. Twitter, as a social media platform, is valuable for studying the motivations that drive digital inclusion and help counter digital exclusion.
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spelling pubmed-106212952023-11-03 Digital inclusion: A mixed-method study of user behavior and content on Twitter Salzmann-Erikson, Martin Digit Health Original Research OBJECTIVE: This study is the first to explore user behavior and characterize the content shared about digital inclusion on Twitter. METHODS: This mixed-methods research consists of 14,000 tweets featuring the hashtag “#digitalinclusion,” posted on Twitter over 15 months. A machine learning technique, latent Dirichlet allocation, was utilized to discover abstract topics within the tweets statistically. The algorithm identified important keywords and text associated with each topic by modeling the underlying word co-occurrence patterns in the dataset. A manual qualitative content analysis was applied to the qualitative data (1000 tweets). RESULTS: Tweets containing #digitalinclusion are driven by four motives: 1) warning against the risks of digital exclusion; 2) tweets that promote actions to increase digital inclusion; 3) tweets that call for others to take action to improve digitalization; and 4) tweets that are neutral but fuel the debate by being active. Quantitative analysis revealed that users discussing digital inclusion come from various continents, including the USA, Europe, Africa, and Asia. There were 3931 unique user accounts, with individuals posting between one and 368 tweets. Approximately half of the tweets contained some embedded media. CONCLUSION: The study concludes that digital inclusion is a subject that engages Twitter users worldwide. Tweets that were associated with community and local initiatives and sustainable development had the highest engagement in terms of the number of retweets and likes. The interpretation is that digital inclusion is crucial for achieving equity in living conditions and enhancing access to health information and services. While initiatives to increase digital inclusion are underway, Twitter users call for more efforts to prevent growing digital exclusion. Twitter, as a social media platform, is valuable for studying the motivations that drive digital inclusion and help counter digital exclusion. SAGE Publications 2023-11-01 /pmc/articles/PMC10621295/ /pubmed/37928325 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/20552076231211277 Text en © The Author(s) 2023 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
spellingShingle Original Research
Salzmann-Erikson, Martin
Digital inclusion: A mixed-method study of user behavior and content on Twitter
title Digital inclusion: A mixed-method study of user behavior and content on Twitter
title_full Digital inclusion: A mixed-method study of user behavior and content on Twitter
title_fullStr Digital inclusion: A mixed-method study of user behavior and content on Twitter
title_full_unstemmed Digital inclusion: A mixed-method study of user behavior and content on Twitter
title_short Digital inclusion: A mixed-method study of user behavior and content on Twitter
title_sort digital inclusion: a mixed-method study of user behavior and content on twitter
topic Original Research
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10621295/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37928325
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/20552076231211277
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