Accepted for/Published in: Interactive Journal of Medical Research
Date Submitted: May 30, 2023
Date Accepted: Jul 25, 2024
Understanding Loneliness through Comparative Analysis of Twitter and Reddit Data
ABSTRACT
Background:
Loneliness is a global public health issue contributing to a variety of mental and physical health issues. It also increases the risk of life-threatening conditions as well as contributes to burden on the economy in terms of the number of days lost to productivity. Loneliness is a highly varied concept though, which is a result of multiple factors.
Objective:
To understand loneliness this paper carries out a comparative analysis of data on loneliness on Twitter and Reddit, two popular social media platforms. These platforms differ in terms of their use as Twitter allows only short posts while Reddit entertains longer posts in a forum setting.
Methods:
We collected global data on loneliness in October 2022. Twitter posts containing the words “lonely, “loneliness, “alone”, “solitude”, and “isolation” were collected. Reddit posts were extracted in March 2023. Using natural language processing techniques (VADER from the NLP toolkit) the study identifies and extracts relevant keywords and phrases related to loneliness from user-generated content on both platforms. The extracted data is then subjected to comparative analysis to identify common themes and trends related to loneliness across the two platforms.
Results:
The collected tweets analyzed were 100,000 and the number of total unique Reddit posts was around 10,000 including comments. The results of the study reveal a significant correlation between expressions on social media and loneliness, with both platforms showing similar patterns in terms of the prevalence and nature of loneliness-related content.
Conclusions:
The nature of data on Reddit is more comprehensive when it comes to specific themes, hence a smaller dataset produces more topics which are correlated to loneliness. On the other hand, Twitter gives a range of socio-economic and personal-emotional themes and topics. The results of this paper show that although the pattern of expression of loneliness is similar across the platforms, there are additional topics that come to fore through Reddit data but with less frequency of occurrence. Clinical Trial: Exempted.
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