Twitter Chatter About Marijuana

Hookah-Related Twitter Chatter: A Content Analysis

INTRODUCTION Hookah smoking is becoming increasingly popular among young adults and is often perceived as less harmful than cigarette use. Prior studies show that it is common for youth and young adults to network about substance use behaviors on social media. Social media messages about hookah could influence its use among young people. We explored normalization or discouragement of hookah smo...

Local chatter or international buzz? Language differences on posts about Zika research on Twitter and Facebook

BACKGROUND When the Zika virus outbreak became a global health emergency in early 2016, the scientific community responded with an increased output of Zika-related research. This upsurge in research naturally made its way into academic journals along with editorials, news, and reports. However, it is not yet known how or whether these scholarly communications were distributed to the populations...

Much ado about marijuana.

Positional Goods and the Social Rank Hypothesis: Income Inequality Affects Online Chatter about High and LowStatus Brands on Twitter

According to a social rank hypothesis, consumers who live in regions with higher income inequality will show greater interest in, and attention toward, positional goods and high-status brands that serve a social signaling role. We analyze millions of posts on the microblogging platform Twitter for mentions of highand low-status brands. We find that luxury brands such as “Louis Vuitton” and “Rol...

Chatter Matters: How Twitter Can Open the Black Box of Online Word-of-Mouth

We collect Word-of-mouth (WOM) data on movies from Twitter and employ both a time-series model and a dynamic panel data model to study the influence of WOM on movie box office revenues. Compared with most previous literature that measures WOM through its volume or dispersion, we directly measure the number of recipients of each WOM message using the unique social structural information on Twitt...