Characterizing the Prevalence of Obesity Misinformation, Stigma, Positivity, and Factual Content on the Social Media Platform Reddit Between 2011 and 2019: Infodemiology Study (Preprint)

• DOI: 10.2196/preprints.36729
• Publication Date: 2022-01-28T17:41:56Z
• Authors: Catherine C. Pollack; Jennifer A. Emond; A. James O'Malley; Anna Byrd; Peter Green; Katherine E. Miller; Soroush Vosoughi; Diane Gilbert-Dia...; Tracy Onega
• Keywords: Misinformation; Stigma; Scrutiny

<sec> <title>BACKGROUND</title> Reddit is a popular social media platform that has faced scrutiny for inflammatory language against those with obesity, yet there been no comprehensive analysis of its obesity-related content. </sec> <title>OBJECTIVE</title> To quantify the presence four types content on (misinformation, stigma, positivity, and facts) identify psycholinguistic features may be enriched within each one. <title>METHODS</title> All sentences (n = 764,179) containing “obese” or “obesity” from top-level comments 689,447) made non-age-restricted subreddits (i.e., smaller communities Reddit) between 2011 2019 contained one series keywords were evaluated. Four common natural processing extracted to train machine learning classifier label sentence as categories ambiguous/other. <title>RESULTS</title> After removing ambiguous sentences, 3,610 labeled misinformation, 14,366 14,799 68,276 facts. Each category had markers distinguished it other data well an external corpus. For example, misinformation higher average percent negations (β 3.71, 95% CI: 3.53, 3.90, P&lt;.001) but lower number words greater than six letters -1.47, -1.85, -1.10, relative Stigma proportion swear (β=1.83, 1.62, 2.04, first-person singular pronouns -5.30, -5.44, -5.16, positivity. <title>CONCLUSIONS</title> There are distinct properties can leveraged rapidly deleterious minimal human intervention. Future work should assess whether these shared across languages media.