Examining Exposure to Messaging, Content, and Hate Speech from Partisan News Social Media Posts on Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities

Thu T. Nguyen (), Weijun Yu, Junaid S. Merchant, Shaniece Criss, Chris J. Kennedy, Heran Mane, Krishik N. Gowda, Melanie Kim, Ritu Belani, Caitlin F. Blanco, Manvitha Kalachagari, Xiaohe Yue, Vanessa V. Volpe, Amani M. Allen, Yulin Hswen and Quynh C. Nguyen
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Thu T. Nguyen: Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics, University of Maryland School of Public Health, College Park, MD 20742, USA
Weijun Yu: Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics, University of Maryland School of Public Health, College Park, MD 20742, USA
Junaid S. Merchant: Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics, University of Maryland School of Public Health, College Park, MD 20742, USA
Shaniece Criss: Department of Health Sciences, Furman University, Greenville, SC 29613, USA
Chris J. Kennedy: Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02114, USA
Heran Mane: Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics, University of Maryland School of Public Health, College Park, MD 20742, USA
Krishik N. Gowda: Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics, University of Maryland School of Public Health, College Park, MD 20742, USA
Melanie Kim: Department of Anthropology, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912, USA
Ritu Belani: Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics, University of Maryland School of Public Health, College Park, MD 20742, USA
Caitlin F. Blanco: Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics, University of Maryland School of Public Health, College Park, MD 20742, USA
Manvitha Kalachagari: Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics, University of Maryland School of Public Health, College Park, MD 20742, USA
Xiaohe Yue: Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics, University of Maryland School of Public Health, College Park, MD 20742, USA
Vanessa V. Volpe: Department of Psychology, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695, USA
Amani M. Allen: Divisions of Community Health Sciences and Epidemiology, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94704, USA
Yulin Hswen: Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, CA 94143, USA
Quynh C. Nguyen: Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics, University of Maryland School of Public Health, College Park, MD 20742, USA

IJERPH, 2023, vol. 20, issue 4, 1-13

Abstract: We investigated the content of liberal and conservative news media Facebook posts on race and ethnic health disparities. A total of 3,327,360 liberal and conservative news Facebook posts from the United States (US) from January 2015 to May 2022 were collected from the Crowd Tangle platform and filtered for race and health-related keywords. Qualitative content analysis was conducted on a random sample of 1750 liberal and 1750 conservative posts. Posts were analyzed for a continuum of hate speech using a newly developed method combining faceted Rasch item response theory with deep learning. Across posts referencing Asian, Black, Latinx, Middle Eastern, and immigrants/refugees, liberal news posts had lower hate scores compared to conservative posts. Liberal news posts were more likely to acknowledge and detail the existence of racial/ethnic health disparities, while conservative news posts were more likely to highlight the negative consequences of protests, immigration, and the disenfranchisement of Whites. Facebook posts from liberal and conservative news focus on different themes with fewer discussions of racial inequities in conservative news. Investigating the discourse on race and health in social media news posts may inform our understanding of the public’s exposure to and knowledge of racial health disparities, and policy-level support for ameliorating these disparities.

Keywords: racial health disparities; news media; social media; machine learning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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