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For many, it can be intimidating or even impossible to seek professional medical help if they have symptoms of an illness. As such, some people approach platforms like Reddit or Quora for a community-based conversation in an attempt to…
Understanding the sociodemographic composition of online platforms is essential for accurately interpreting digital behavior and its societal implications. Yet, current methods often lack the transparency and reliability required, risking…
Online forums (e.g., Reddit) are used by many parents to discuss their challenges, needs, and receive support. While studies have investigated the contents of posts made to popular parental subreddits revealing the family health concerns…
Advice forums are a crowdsourced way to reinforce cultural norms and moral behavior. Sites like Reddit contain massive amounts of natural language human interaction, with rules and norms unique to each individual subreddit community. To…
Recently, research on mental health conditions using public online data, including Reddit, has surged in NLP and health research but has not reported user characteristics, which are important to judge generalisability of findings. This…
Reddit is a major venue for mental-health information interaction and peer support, where privacy concerns increasingly surface in user discourse. Thus, we analyze privacy-related discussions across 14 mental-health and regulatory…
While major strides have been made towards gender equality in public life, serious inequality remains in the domestic sphere, especially around parenting. The present study analyses discussions about parenting on Reddit to explore audience…
We evaluate homophily and heterophily among ideological and demographic groups in a typical opinion formation context: online discussions of current news. We analyze user interactions across five years in the r/news community on Reddit, one…
We often treat social media as a lens onto society. How might that lens distort the popularity of political and social viewpoints? We examine discrepancies between publicly posted and privately surveyed opinions within communities,…
Information about gender differences in interests is necessary to disentangle the effects of discrimination and choice when gender inequalities occur, such as in employment. This article assesses gender differences in interests within the…
Approximately one-third of adults search the internet for health information before visiting an emergency department (ED), with 75% encountering inaccurate content. This study examines how such searches influence patient care. We conducted…
Human beings adapt their language to the audience they interact with. To study the impact of audience and gender in a natural setting, we choose a domain where gender plays a particularly salient role: parenting. We collect posts from the…
This paper characterizes the self-disclosure behavior of Reddit users across 11 different types of self-disclosure. We find that at least half of the users share some type of disclosure in at least 10% of their posts, with half of these…
In the last decade, the United States has lost more than 500,000 people from an overdose involving prescription and illicit opioids making it a national public health emergency (USDHHS, 2017). Medical practitioners require robust and timely…
The complex unfolding of the US opioid epidemic in the last 20 years has been the subject of a large body of medical and pharmacological research, and it has sparked a multidisciplinary discussion on how to implement interventions and…
Mental health remains a significant challenge of public health worldwide. With increasing popularity of online platforms, many use the platforms to share their mental health conditions, express their feelings, and seek help from the…
We investigate relationships between online self-disclosure and received social feedback during the COVID-19 crisis. We crawl a total of 2,399 posts and 29,851 associated comments from the r/COVID19_support subreddit and manually extract…
Older adults' growing use of the internet and related technologies, further accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, has prompted not only a critical examination of their behaviors and attitudes about online threats but also a greater…
We use data from the Facebook Advertisement Platform to study patterns of demographic disparities in usage of Facebook across countries. We address three main questions: (1) How does Facebook usage differ by age and by gender around the…
Americans are increasingly relying on crowdfunding to pay for the costs of healthcare. In medical crowdfunding, online platforms allow individuals to appeal to social networks to request donations for health and medical needs. Users are…