A new uncertain multi-objective programming model with chance-entropy constraint for advertising promotion.

The COVID-19 outbreak has forced people to stay at home to prevent the spread of the virus. In this case, social media platforms have become the main communication venue for people. Online sales platforms have also become the main field for people's daily consumption. So, how to make full use of social media to carry out online advertising promotion, and then achieve better marketing, is one of the core issues that the marketing industry must pay attention to and solve. Therefore, this study takes the advertiser as the decision-maker, maximizes the number of full playing, likes, comments and forwarding, and minimizes the cost of advertising promotion as the decision-making goals, and Key Opinion Leader (KOL) selection as the decision vector. Based on this, a multi-objective uncertain programming model of advertising promotion is constructed. Among them, the chance-entropy constraint is proposed by combining the entropy constraint and the chance constraint. In addition, the multi-objective uncertain programming model is transformed into a clear single-objective model through mathematical derivation and linear weighting of the model. Finally, the practicability and effectiveness of the model are verified by numerical simulation, and decision-making suggestions for advertising promotion are put forward.

Who's fuelling Twitter disinformation on the COVID-19 vaccination campaign? Evidence from a computational analysis of the green pass debate

The COVID-19 health emergency increased disinformation's role and fostered a growing fragmentation between conflicting opinions on COVID-19 causes, vaccination policies, and government measures to deal with the pandemic. Studies have found that disinformation sources included private citizens, independent organizations, mainstream online newspapers and even public figures such as politicians, commentators, bloggers etc. In Italy, the Twitter debate ignited a conflict between mainstream positions in favour of restrictions, and more libertarian opinions extremely critical of government measures. Our research investigates, through a computational approach based on digital methods and social network analysis (SNA), opinion leaders' roles in the Italian green pass debate on Twitter that surfaced in the second half of 2021. Drawing on the classic two-step model of communication, our essay identifies the Italian opinion leaders on Twitter and their content dissemination strategies. Our analysis reveals a limited number of dominant voices interacting in segregated networks of users. These networks can be considered echo chambers given the verbose and self-referential tweeting activity of their opinion leaders. Moreover, such activity involves spreading disinformation and conspiracy theories through a dissemination strategy aimed at diverting the audience from Twitter, towards ‘below-the-radar' environments (e.g. Rumble), where political views are more radical. ©, The Founding Editors, Contemporary Italian Politics.

Opinion Leaders and Structural Hole Spanners Influencing Echo Chambers in Discussions About COVID-19 Vaccines on Social Media in China: Network Analysis.

BACKGROUND: Social media provide an ideal medium for breeding and reinforcing vaccine hesitancy, especially during public health emergencies. Algorithmic recommendation-based technology along with users' selective exposure and group pressure lead to online echo chambers, causing inefficiency in vaccination promotion. Avoiding or breaking echo chambers largely relies on key users' behavior. OBJECTIVE: With the ultimate goal of eliminating the impact of echo chambers related to vaccine hesitancy on social media during public health emergencies, the aim of this study was to develop a framework to quantify the echo chamber effect in users' topic selection and attitude contagion about COVID-19 vaccines or vaccinations; detect online opinion leaders and structural hole spanners based on network attributes; and explore the relationships of their behavior patterns and network locations, as well as the relationships of network locations and impact on topic-based and attitude-based echo chambers. METHODS: We called the Sina Weibo application programming interface to crawl tweets related to the COVID-19 vaccine or vaccination and user information on Weibo, a Chinese social media platform. Adopting social network analysis, we examined the low echo chamber effect based on topics in representational networks of information, according to attitude in communication flow networks of users under different interactive mechanisms (retweeting, commenting). Statistical and visual analyses were used to characterize behavior patterns of key users (opinion leaders, structural hole spanners), and to explore their function in avoiding or breaking topic-based and attitude-based echo chambers. RESULTS: Users showed a low echo chamber effect in vaccine-related topic selection and attitude interaction. For the former, the homophily was more obvious in retweeting than in commenting, whereas the opposite trend was found for the latter. Speakers, replicators, and monologists tended to be opinion leaders, whereas common users, retweeters, and networkers tended to be structural hole spanners. Both leaders and spanners tended to be "bridgers" to disseminate diverse topics and communicate with users holding cross-cutting attitudes toward COVID-19 vaccines. Moreover, users who tended to echo a single topic could bridge multiple attitudes, while users who focused on diverse topics also tended to serve as bridgers for different attitudes. CONCLUSIONS: This study not only revealed a low echo chamber effect in vaccine hesitancy, but further elucidated the underlying reasons from the perspective of users, offering insights for research about the form, degree, and formation of echo chambers, along with depolarization, social capital, stakeholder theory, user portraits, dissemination pattern of topic, and sentiment. Therefore, this work can help to provide strategies for public health and public opinion managers to cooperate toward avoiding or correcting echo chamber chaos and effectively promoting online vaccine campaigns.

Political Disputes and Digital Practices of Youtubers during the covid covid-19 Pandemic

The aim of this research is to analyze the youtubers who generate and share political content. A distinction is made between two groups: those who defend government actions and those who are detractors. It seeks to understand how these youtubers are constructed, what their resources, strategies and stories are to persuade and influence their audience and, finally, what the political culture underlying the participation of these opinion leaders is. This was observed in the publications produced during the first months of the covid-19 pandemic in Mexico. The case study method and a qualitative methodology involving online content analysis are used. The author proposes a definition of youtubers, a conceptual framework for their analysis and evidence of a nascent sociological phenomenon. © 2022 Colegio de Mexico, A.C., Departamento de Publicaciones. All rights reserved.

On Designing a Time Sensitive Interaction Graph to Identify Twitter Opinion Leaders

What happened on social media during the recent pandemic? Who was the opinion leader of the conversations? Who influenced whom? Were they medical doctors, ordinary people, scientific experts? Did health institutions play an important role in informing and updating citizens? Identifying opinion leaders within social platforms is of particular importance and, in this paper, we introduce the idea of a time sensitive interaction graph to identify opinion leaders within Twitter conversations. To evaluate our proposal, we focused on all the tweets posted on Twitter in the period 2020-21 and we considered just the ones that were Italian-written and were related to COVID-19. After mapping these tweets into the graph, we applied the PageRank algorithm to extract the opinion leaders of these conversations. Results show that our approach is effective in identifying opinion leaders and therefore it might be used to monitor the role that specific accounts (i.e., health authorities, politicians, city administrators) have within specific conversations. © 2022 ACM.

New interaction modalities between the pharmaceutical industry and physicians.

Due to sanitary restrictions secondary to the COVID-19 pandemic, various interactions between the pharmaceutical industry and physicians have changed. One of them has been the method for promoting medicinal products through academic meetings around diseases of financial interest. A recent modality has been unilateral promotion by the pharmaceutical industry through academic events with the invitation of so-called "experts" for the promotion of a specific drug. These meetings are often biased not towards optimal care of a disease, but rather towards commercial promotion of a specific drug, which may or may not be the best option, without considering associated therapeutic alternatives. The Committee of Ethics and Transparency in the Physician-Industry Relationship, of the National Academy of Medicine, analyzes this new circumstance and proposes some considerations to the medical community.

Debido a las restricciones sanitarias secundarias a la pandemia de COVID-19, diversas interacciones entre la industria farmacéutica y los médicos cambiaron. Una de ellas ha sido el método promocional de medicamentos a través de reuniones académicas en torno a padecimientos de interés financiero. Una modalidad reciente ha sido la promoción unilateral de un fármaco determinado por parte de la industria farmacéutica por medio de eventos académicos con la invitación de aparentes "expertos". Estas reuniones frecuentemente están sesgadas no hacia la atención óptima de un padecimiento, sino a la promoción comercial de un medicamento específico que pudiera o no ser la mejor opción o sin la consideración de alternativas terapéuticas asociadas. El Comité de Ética y Transparencia en la Relación Médico-Industria, de la Academia Nacional de Medicina de México, analiza esta nueva circunstancia y propone algunas consideraciones a la comunidad médica.

Medical Affairs/Medical Science Liaison: Organizational Structure and Medical Contributions

Objective: To identify the organizational structure and medical contributions of Medical Affairs/Medical Science Liaison (MA/MSL) and its impact on the spread of the coronavirus-19 (COVID-19) infection. Method: We conducted a web-based survey for 45 pharmaceutical companies based in Japan. The outcome of 43 questions related to organizational structure, business activities, key performance indicators (KPI), and indicators of medical contribution were analyzed and compared. Results: Responses were received from 43 pharmaceutical companies (95.6%;26 Japanese and 17 foreign). The total number of MSLs exceeded 1,000 with an average of 30.1 MSLs/company. MSLs supervised an average of 21.8/MSL Key Opinion Leaders/Key Thought Leaders (KOLs/KTLs). There were eight MSL organizations per company on average, and Phase II/III had the most number of MSL organizations. Further, 22 companies (56.4%) had MSL organizations in the oncology area. All the companies were independent from departments mainly engaged in "sales and promotion activities," and the most common KPI was “collection insight from KOL/KTL.” Despite having medical qualifications and highly specialized degrees, training was provided continuously to improve expertise. Based on the life cycle of products, Japanese companies are promoting evidence generation and medical events with KOL/KTL supported by internal and external insights and foreign companies are promoting medical-education activities. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of “in person” activities have significantly decreased and that of "online" activities have increased considerably, and this trend might continue even after the end of the pandemic. Conclusion: The organizational structure and medical contribution of MA/MSL are partially different between Japanese and foreign companies. MSL continued to increase;however, the organization and activities were affected by the product.

An entropy-based method to control COVID-19 rumors in online social networks using opinion leaders.

- In the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, people spread various COVID-19-related rumors and hoaxes that negatively influence human civilization through online social networks (OSN). The proposed research addresses the unique and innovative approach to controlling COVID-19 rumors through the power of opinion leaders (OLs) in OSN. The entire process is partitioned into two phases; the first phase describes the novel Reputation-based Opinion Leader Identification (ROLI) algorithm, including a unique voting method to identify the top-T OLs in the OSN. The second phase describes the technique to measure the aggregated polarity score of each posted tweet/post and compute each user's reputation. The empirical reputation is utilized to calculate the user's trust, the post's entropy, and its veracity. If the experimental entropy of the post is lower than the empirical threshold value, the post is likely to be categorized as a rumor. The proposed approach operated on Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit social networks for validation. The ROLI algorithm provides 91% accuracy, 93% precision, 95% recall, and 94% F1-score over other Social Network Analysis (SNA) measures to find OLs in OSN. Moreover, the proposed approach's rumor controlling effectiveness and efficiency is also estimated based on three standard metrics; affected degree, represser degree, and diffuser degree, and obtained 26%, 22%, and 23% improvement, respectively. The concluding outcomes illustrate that the influence of OLs is exceptionally significant in controlling COVID-19 rumors.

Contributions of the Medical Affairs Department to Healthcare Professionals and the Effects of the New Coronavirus Disease 2019 Pandemic on the Contributions

Objective: The purpose of this study was to assess the opinions of healthcare professional regarding the contributions of the Medical Affairs department. Furthermore, we aimed to identify factors influencing and reasons for the contributions in the new coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic situation. Design/Methods: A web-based survey was conducted among healthcare professionals (Key Opinion Leader/Key Thought Leader, KOL/KTL) who had multiple contacts with the Medical Affairs department, Japan. Results: The responses of 141 KOL/KTLs in Japan were collected;77.3% of the respondents indicated that the contributions of the Medical Affairs department exceeded their expectations (achieved the expected level of contribution). The most common responses were “the identification of unmet medical needs” and “the dissemination of medical and scientific information, providing advanced medical and scientific information;” other responses included “promoting sales of the company's drugs.” The requests from KOL/KTLs regarding quality were “knowledge about biological and clinical statistics” and “proposal and quick response ability from the perspective of medical staff and patients,” but these responses were partially different between physicians and pharmacists. COVID-19 has resulted in substantial changes, for example, “face-to-face” interactions have significantly decreased from 91.5 to 50.4% and “Online” interactions have significantly increased from 20.6 to 70.9%. However, the effects of the declaration of emergency state could not be identified. The KOL/KTLs requested to make the meeting times more appropriate, conduct in-depth two-way discussions, provide latest information, and discuss about professional manners and behaviors. Conclusion: In summary, regardless of the changes in the types of activities caused by COVID-19, the Medical Affairs department has made substantial contributions to healthcare professionals, who highly appreciated them. Furthermore, depending on responses of individuals whose expectations could not be met, areas of improvements have been suggested.

Framing Public Opinion on Physician-Patient Conflicts on Microblog: A Comparative Content Analysis.

Introduction: Physician-patient conflicts in China have increased more than ten times from the 2000s to the 2020 and arouse heated discussions on microblog. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic is believed to have brought a turnaround in the physician-patient relationship. However, little is known about the similarities and differences among the views of opinion leaders from the general public, physicians, and media regarding physician-patient conflict incidents on microblog, and whether the outbreak had an impact on this. Objective: This study aims to explore how opinion leaders from the physicians, general public, and media framed posts on major physician-patient conflict incidents on microblog, and compare the microblog post frames before and after the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings will provide more objective evidence of the attitudes and perspectives of the health professionals, general public, and media on physician-patient conflicts, and the influence of pandemics on physician-patient relationship. Methods: A comparative content analysis was conducted to examine the posts (n = 941) of microblog opinion leaders regarding major physician-patient conflicts in China from 2012 to 2020. Results: Post-pandemic microblog posts used more cooperation, positive and negative frames, but mentioned less health-related knowledge; no difference was found in the use of conflict and attribution frames. Results on the use of frames by opinion leaders from different communities found that the media used more conflict, cooperation, attribution, and positive frames, but used fewer negative frames and mentioned less health-related knowledge than general public and physicians. Results on the use of frames for different incidents found that incidents of violence against physicians used more cooperation, positive and negative frames and mentioned less health-related knowledge; in the contract, incidents of patient death used more attribution frames and mentioned more health-related knowledge. Conclusion: The physician and general public opinion leaders share some similarities in their post frames, implying that no fundamental discrepancy between them regarding physician-patient conflict incidents. However, the imbalanced use of frames by media microblogger would cultivate and reinforce the public perception of physician-patient contradictions. After the COVID-19 pandemic, more cooperation and positive frames were used in the posts, indicating an improvement in the physician-patient relationship in China.

Perceived Credibility of Tweets by Opinion Leaders During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Spain

The informational practices of citizens, transformed by the digital sphere, pose new challenges such as misinformation and disinformation, and they also require a rethinking of the role of opinion leaders. We explored how, on Twitter, the credibility of COVID-19 news was influenced by the source of the news. We conducted a survey of a representative sample of the Spanish population (N = 2,041) who were asked to rate politician, expert, celebrity, media, and anonymous citizen tweets for credibility. The results show that the perceived credibility of tweets on COVID-19 by politicians and experts was negative and positive, respectively, when compared with tweets by the media, and also that celebrities and anonymous citizens had no impact on perceptions of credibility. We also found that news credibility was affected by respondent gender, age, occupational status, and education level. We conclude that, despite disintermediation processes, the media continue to underpin news credibility in the digital public sphere.

Analysis of the Evolution of User Emotion and Opinion Leaders' Information Dissemination Behavior in the Knowledge Q&A Community during COVID-19.

Since its emergence in 2019, COVID-19 has quickly triggered widespread public discussion on social media. From 26 February 2020 to 26 September 2020, this study collected data on COVID-19-related posts in the knowledge Q&A community, identified 220 opinion leaders of this community, and used social network analysis and sentiment analysis to analyze the information exchange behavior and emotional evolution of the opinion leaders during COVID-19. The results show that the COVID-19 topic community could be divided into seven main categories. The information dissemination of opinion leader information dissemination network had low efficiency, multiple paths, and a high degree of control. In addition, the emotional evolution of users showed obvious phased characteristics. User emotion changed from initially strong negative to strong positive over the course of the pandemic and eventually tended to be objective and neutral as time passed and the event stabilized.

Cross-Platform Comparative Study of Public Concern on Social Media during the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Empirical Study Based on Twitter and Weibo.

The COVID-19 pandemic has created a global health crisis that has affected economies and societies worldwide. During these times of uncertainty and crisis, people have turned to social media platforms as communication tools and primary information sources. Online discourse is conducted under the influence of many different factors, such as background, culture, politics, etc. However, parallel comparative research studies conducted in different countries to identify similarities and differences in online discourse are still scarce. In this study, we combine the crisis lifecycle and opinion leader concepts and use data mining and a set of predefined search terms (coronavirus and COVID-19) to investigate discourse on Twitter (101,271 tweets) and Sina Weibo (92,037 posts). Then, we use a topic modeling technique, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), to identify the most common issues posted by users and temporal analysis to research the issue's trend. Social Network Analysis (SNA) allows us to discover the opinion leader on the two different platforms. Finally, we find that online discourse reflects the crisis lifecycle according to the stage of COVID-19 in China and the US. Regarding the status of the COVID-19 pandemic, users of Twitter tend to pay more attention to the economic situation while users of Weibo pay more attention to public health. The issues focused on in online discourse have a strong relationship with the development of the crisis in different countries. Additionally, on the Twitter platform many political actors act as opinion leaders, while on the Weibo platform official media and government accounts control the release of information.