Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Dec 6, 2020
Date Accepted: Oct 8, 2021
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Cancer Communication and User Engagement on Chinese Social Media: Extracting Topics Using Text Analytics
ABSTRACT
Background:
Cancer ranks among one of the most serious public health challenges worldwide. In China, the world’s most populous country, about a quarter of the population suffers from cancer. Social media have become an important platform for the Chinese public to express opinions.
Objective:
Therefore, we investigated cancer-related discussions on the Chinese social media platform Weibo to identify cancer topics with the highest level of user engagement.
Methods:
We applied topic modeling and regression analysis to analyze and visualize cancer-related messages on Weibo and examine the relationships between different cancer topics and user engagement (i.e., number of retweets, comments, and likes).
Results:
Results revealed that cancer communication on Weibo has generally focused on six topics including social support, cancer treatment, cancer prevention, women’s cancers, smoking and skin cancer, and others. Discussion about social support and cancer treatment topics attracted the highest user engagement and received the greatest numbers of retweets, comments, and likes.
Conclusions:
Our investigation of cancer-related communication on Weibo provided valuable insights into public concerns about cancer and will help guide the development of health campaigns in response.
Citation
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