Previously submitted to: Journal of Medical Internet Research (no longer under consideration since Feb 24, 2026)
Date Submitted: Oct 24, 2025
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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.
Understanding Public Sentiment on Media Violence Through Social Media Analytics: A Comprehensive Analysis of Instagram Discourse and Its Implications for Public Health Policy
ABSTRACT
Background:
Violent content is becoming increasingly prevalent on digital media platforms. Understanding the nature of this violence and public perception is important for public health initiatives.
Objective:
The investigation focuses on identifying prevalent discourse patterns, emotional responses across demographic groups, and thematic clusters that emerge from organic public conversations about media violence.
Methods:
This study employs advanced computational methods to analyze a comprehensive dataset of Instagram comments related to media violence and public health.
Results:
The sentiment analysis of 87.493 Instagram comments revealed a predominantly negative discourse surrounding media violence. The dominant emotions in the analysis of public discourse were found to be fear and anger. It was determined that there was disappointment due to the failure of relevant stakeholders to take action against violence in the media, or due to inadequate responses. Health professionals stated in 67% of their comments that exposure to media violence could be associated with anxiety, depression, and behavioral disorders in individuals.
Conclusions:
There are significant gaps in the public's understanding regarding individual differences in responses to media violence. The findings indicate that while public discourse demonstrates sophisticated understanding of certain media violence dimensions, but also highlight the necessity of media literacy to increase public awareness of research-supported protective strategies and individual difference factors that mitigate the effects of media violence.
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.