Search Results (78)

The present study explores the use of Instagram as an innovative strategy in the teaching–learning process in the context of animal reproduction topics. In the current era, with digital technology and social media transforming how information is accessed and consumed, it is essential for teachers to adapt and harness the potential of these tools for educational purposes. This article delves into the need for teachers to stay updated with current trends and the importance of promoting digital competences among teachers. This research aims to provide insights into the benefits of integrating social media into the educational landscape. Students of Veterinary Science degrees, Master’s degrees in Equine Sport Medicine as well as vocational education and training (VET) were involved in this study. An Instagram account named “UCOREPRO” was created for educational use, and it was openly available to all users. Instagram usage metrics were consistently tracked. A voluntary survey comprising 35 questions was conducted to collect feedback regarding the educational use of smartphone technology, social media habits and the UCOREPRO Instagram account. The integration of Instagram as an educational tool was positively received by veterinary students. Survey data revealed that 92.3% of respondents found the content engaging, with 79.5% reporting improved understanding of the subject and 71.8% acquiring new knowledge. Students suggested improvements such as more frequent posting and inclusion of academic incentives. Concerns about privacy and digital distraction were present but did not outweigh the perceived benefits. The use of short videos and microlearning strategies proved particularly effective in capturing students’ attention. Overall, Instagram was found to be a promising platform to enhance motivation, engagement, and informal learning in veterinary education, provided that thoughtful integration and clear educational objectives are maintained. In general, students expressed positive opinions about the initiative, and suggested some ways in which it could be improved as an educational tool. Full article

The analysis of the spatial location of tourists is essential for effective tourism management. This study explores the potential effects of large language models (LLMs) on urban travel planning. Despite growing academic interest in LLMs, empirical research on their specific impact on urban tourist locations remains limited, even though these models may significantly affect tourist behavior and spatial dynamics. This article compares the location of heritage sites in the city of Barcelona that are traditionally visited by tourists (as identified through Instagram) with those recommended by ChatGPT. The results show that ChatGPT tends to recommend a much smaller and more spatially concentrated number of tourist attractions than those shared on Instagram. The findings indicate that ChatGPT reinforces mainstream representations of cities by prioritizing well-known landmarks, potentially overlooking emerging or local attractions. This simplification can lead to tourist overcrowding and the marginalization of less-visited areas. Likewise, it may entail new needs for the management of urban spaces. Urban planners and tourism managers may need to intervene to redistribute tourist flows in a context where various models of tourist behavior will coexist. Full article

This study investigated the feasibility of using large language models (LLMs) to infer problematic Instagram use, which refers to excessive or compulsive engagement with the platform that negatively impacts users’ daily functioning, productivity, or well-being, from a limited set of metrics of user engagement in the platform. Specifically, we explored whether OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro could accurately predict self-reported problematic use tendencies based solely on readily available user engagement metrics like daily time spent on the platform, weekly posts and stories, and follower/following counts. Our sample comprised 775 Italian Instagram users (61.6% female; aged 18–63), who were recruited through a snowball sampling method. Item-level and total scores derived by querying the LLMs’ application programming interfaces were correlated with self-report items and the total score measured via an adapted Bergen Social Media Addiction Scale. LLM-inferred scores showed positive correlations with both item-level and total scores for problematic Instagram use. The strongest correlations were observed for the total scores, with GPT-4o achieving a correlation of r = 0.414 and Gemini 1.5 Pro achieving a correlation of r = 0.319. In cross-validated regression analyses, adding LLM-generated scores, especially from GPT-4o, significantly improved the prediction of problematic Instagram use compared to using usage metrics alone. GPT-4o’s performance in random forest models was comparable to models trained directly on Instagram metrics, demonstrating its ability to capture complex, non-linear relationships indicative of addiction without needing extensive model training. This study provides compelling preliminary evidence for the use of LLMs in inferring problematic Instagram use from limited data points, opening exciting new avenues for research and intervention. Full article

The digital age, driven by advancements in data processing and internet technologies, has seen virtual social networks, particularly Instagram, become integral to daily life, influencing both leisure and professional activities. Instagram, with over two billion users in 2023, emphasizes visual storytelling, making it a pivotal platform for media outlets to engage audiences through photos and videos. This study quantitatively analyses the Instagram engagement and content strategies of five prominent legacy news outlets from the United States and the United Kingdom—The New York Times, The Guardian, USA Today, The Independent, and The Washington Post. Through an examination of over 9000 posts from January to December 2023, this research evaluates posting frequency, user engagement (likes and comments), hashtag usage, profile mentions, and geographic coverage. Findings indicate significant differences in posting strategies and engagement levels, highlighting The Washington Post’s intensive posting and The Guardian’s selective engagement strategy. This study emphasizes tailored strategies, thematic consistency, and careful use of mentions and hashtags as crucial for maximizing audience interaction. Full article

This study examines the evolving relationship between online media coverage and protest movements by analyzing year-long demonstrations in Israel against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Through comprehensive qualitative thematic analysis and content analyses of 219 online newspaper articles from five major Israeli newspapers; 324 social media posts across Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter; and 9 semi-structured interviews with protest leaders, this research identifies a gradual paradigm shift in protest representation in online media. The findings reveal a transition from the traditional “protest paradigm”—which frames protests as violent and remote through warlike discourse and visual distancing—toward an emerging “our protest paradigm”, characterized by rhetorical and visual proximity to protesters. This new paradigm manifests through personal testimonies in mainstream media and portrait photography on social media platforms, both creating a sense of closeness and accountability. The study further reveals a significant disconnect between protest leaders’ perceptions and legacy media, as leaders increasingly view traditional media as irrelevant despite their advisers’ recommendations to engage with it. Using polysystem theory as a theoretical framework, this research demonstrates how two media systems—legacy media and social media—operate with epistemological rigidity, challenging the previously established notion of “competitive symbiosis” between protesters and journalists. This investigation offers a novel analytical perspective through the lens of distance, illuminating how changing dynamics in online information transfer are reshaping protest coverage and production. The resulting paradigm model explains the coexistence of two simultaneous protest paradigms and provides valuable insights into the contemporary relationship between social movements, legacy media, and digital platforms in an evolving media ecosystem. Full article

Despite extensive scholarship on social media political party strategies or intra-party-political campaigns across digital platforms, it remains relatively unexplored how individual presidential candidates adopt social media to frame their messages on key political issues for voter engagement, especially in the West Africa region. To fill this gap, this study examines how the two major presidential candidates in Ghana, John Mahama of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and Mahamudu Bawumia of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), use social media platforms to frame key political issues during the 2024 election campaign. Using framing theory and digital multimodal discourse analysis as the conceptual and methodological frameworks, the study examines content on X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and Instagram, with a focus on issues related to the economy and education, while also assessing how platform-specific affordances shape the presentation and visibility of these frames. The findings of the study reveal three core dynamics in the framing strategies of both candidates: (1) contrasting economic narratives (‘Resetting Ghana’ vs. ‘It Is Possible’), (2) competing visions of education (reform vs. continuity), and (3) platform-specific engagement patterns. These findings offer insight into how political actors leverage digital affordances beyond simple messaging tools into structured framing mechanisms and strategically construct narratives to shape public discourse and influence voter engagement. Full article

This study analyses social media networks in tourism using graphs focusing on user influence, hashtag patterns, and engagement. This study aims to reveal the structural function of core users, development of hashtags, and interaction patterns that construct tourism discourses. Using NodeXL 2024 for social network visualization and clustering analysis, this study measures centrality, modularity, and geodesic distances for influential user detection, topical dissemination, and engagement pattern identification. The results uncover bridging nodes between different communities, the proliferation of thematic hashtags related to sustainability and cultural heritage, and the role of emotional and visual storytelling in the use of engagement patterns. The theoretical implications also progress SNA application in tourism studies by illuminating aspects of how online discourses coalesce and the effect of SNA on access. In practical terms, this study indicates that destination marketers must consider leveraging key influencers, using strategic types of hashtags, and by monitoring engagement at key times to maximize effective destination marketing and to enhance crisis communication. These contributions notwithstanding, limitations involve the omission of sentiment analysis and the necessity for longitudinal data. By exploring new emerging platforms like TikTok and Instagram, researchers can begin to understand the more relevant trends of digital engagement. The present research offers a data-driven approach for facilitating the significance of integrating social media strategies with network externalities for tourism operators. Full article

This article aims to reflect on the digital ethnography (cyberethnography or netnography) and visual ethnography (using images and videos) focused on the figure of the buchona, which is situated within the context of the narcoculture in northern Mexico. The approach begins with a general description of what is understood by narcoculture and its relationship with social networks; it addresses the representation of the buchona (a narcotrafficker’s girlfriend) within the dynamics of Instagram. This article highlights the challenge of observing research subjects (buchonas) associated with violent and dangerous environments (narcotrafficking), which requires alternative strategies that ensure the researcher’s safety while maintaining an ethical and rigorous perspective in interpreting empirical data as a phenomenological exercise. The discussion is framed by two main points: on one hand, netnography is considered a useful and necessary method since the scenarios being observed take place on Instagram (posts). As a result, this social network is embedded within the prevailing needs of the new youth in Mexico and the world, where visual content is central to its importance and impact. On the other hand, this article uncovers opportunities linked to the data collection and interpretation process, as a methodological challenge within cities facing security issues. Full article

Threads is a new social network that was launched by Meta in July 2023 and conceived as a direct alternative to X. It is a unique case study in the social network landscape, as it is content-based like X, but has an Instagram-based growth model, which makes it significantly different from X. As it was launched recently, studies on Threads are still scarce. One of the most common investigations in social networks regards power users (also called influencers, lead users, influential users, etc.), i.e., those users who can significantly influence information dissemination, user behavior, and ultimately the current dynamics and future development of a social network. In this paper, we want to contribute to the knowledge of Threads by showing that there are indeed power users in this social network and then attempt to understand the main features that characterize them. The definition of power users that we adopt here is novel and leverages the four classical centrality measures of Social Network Analysis. This ensures that our study of power users can benefit from the enormous knowledge on centrality measures that has accumulated in the literature over the years. In order to conduct our analysis, we had to build a Threads dataset, as none existed in the literature that contained the information necessary for our studies. Once we built such a dataset, we decided to make it open and thus available to all researchers who want to perform analyses on Threads. This dataset, the new definition of power users, and the characterization of Threads power users are the main contributions of this paper. Full article

This study investigated whether young adults’ social media use and subjective well-being (SWB) changed during the COVID-19 pandemic. It examined the possible relationships between social media use, SWB, and personality traits. It included generalized trust, self-consciousness, friendship, and desire for self-presentation and admiration, in relation to different patterns of social media use and genders. Data were collected from university students in Japan from 2021 to 2023 and were analyzed based on different social media use patterns. The conceptual model was based on the cognitive bias and social network mediation models. Data were analyzed using ANOVA and regression analyses. The findings revealed that, over time, young adults’ anxiety toward COVID-19 decreased, while their SWB improved and their social support increased. Depression tendencies showed a negative association, whereas social support was positively related to improvement of SWB for all three patterns of social media use. Furthermore, online communication skills had a positive relationship with improvements in students’ SWB in Patterns 1 (LINE + Twitter + Instagram) and 2 (LINE + Twitter + Instagram + TikTok). The self-indeterminate factor had a positive relationship with students’ SWB for all patterns in 2022 and 2023, and the praise acquisition factor had a positive relationship with improvements in students’ SWB in Patterns 1 and 2. These results suggest that young adults maintained their mental health through different social media usage patterns, considering their personality traits and social situations associated with COVID-19. Particularly, receiving social support, decreasing people’s depression tendencies, and displaying different aspects of the “self” online can improve SWB. This study elucidates the mental health situations of university students in Japan and will help public health authorities develop new support programs that help digital natives improve their mental health in the context of social environmental changes. Full article

As our society increasingly relies on digital platforms for information, the spread of fake news has become a pressing concern. This study investigates the ability of Greek and Portuguese Instagram users to identify fake news, highlighting the influence of cultural differences. The responses of 220 Instagram users were collected through questionnaires in Greece and Portugal. The data analysis investigates characteristics of Instagram posts, social endorsement, and platform usage duration. The results reveal distinct user behaviors: Greeks exhibit a unique inclination towards social connections, displaying an increased trust in friends’ content and investing more time on Instagram, reflecting the importance of personal connections in their media consumption. They also give less importance to a certain post’s characteristics, such as content opposing personal beliefs, emotional language, and poor grammar, spelling, or formatting when identifying fake news, compared to the Portuguese, suggesting a weaker emphasis on content quality in their evaluations. These findings show that cultural differences affect how people behave on Instagram. Hence, content creators, platforms, and policymakers need specific plans to make online spaces more informative. Strategies should focus on enhancing awareness of key indicators of fake news, such as linguistic quality and post structure, while addressing the role of personal and social networks in the spread of misinformation. Full article

Studies on journalistic work and production on social media typically focus on large media outlets in developed countries. In this article, we shift the lens to a peripheral area of a peripheral country: Argentine Patagonia. Our objective was to analyse journalistic production on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter in the eight most-followed local and regional news media outlets. We analysed the narratives, the extent to which they apply transmedia journalism, and how they have evolved compared to studies from 2021. We also conducted structured interviews with social media managers to gain insight into their professional practices. We conclude that, 15 years since the creation of the first profiles, promoting website content remains the primary goal of North Patagonian media networks. Since 2021, there have been more frequent updates but less native production, especially on Facebook and Twitter. Despite the shortage of staff and precarious working conditions, some news media outlets have been able to innovate on Instagram, introducing a variety of multimedia formats, a more conversational tone, diverse update rhythms, adapted content, and even specific content that is organised into sections. Information production for the platforms has been integrated into journalistic routines even when public interaction with the audience remains very limited. Full article

Twenty-first century digital technologies and popular visual art have transformed the ways military conflicts are experienced, narrated, and shared. It demonstrates that digital platforms have become arenas for constructing visual narratives that influence public perception and engagement with the conflict. Through a multimodal and visual analysis of over 950 digital artworks shared on Instagram during the first three months of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine, this study investigates how these artworks form specific visual narratives which contribute to portraying the new wartime reality while also constructing images of the self and the other through heroization, victimization, dehumanization, and other strategies. All these visual narratives jointly represent the complexity of the war reality and form an epistemic understanding of the conflict. This study highlights the important function that popular visual art on digital platforms such as Instagram plays in shaping perceptions of the Russo-Ukrainian War, particularly in expressing emotions, conveying traumas, and influencing public opinions. Full article

Plastic litter is a global threat affecting all marine ecosystems. Utilizing digital media platforms like Google, Facebook, and Instagram we assessed the detrimental effects of marine plastic litter on the biodiversity of the Italian marine ecosystem. We noted that marine plastic litter had adverse consequences on marine reptiles, mammals, sea birds, fish, crustaceans, and mollusks, including endangered and vulnerable marine species. The loggerhead sea turtle (Caretta caretta) was the most recorded species found entangled in plastic litter. Our investigation revealed that abandoned, lost, or otherwise discarded fishing gear are the primary contributors to the entanglement of numerous marine species. The current study represents a preliminary step towards establishing databases that document records of entanglement, which may be useful in adopting new conservation measures in the Mediterranean geographical subareas. Our results emphasize the critical need for collaborative efforts among all stakeholders and policymakers to effectively manage marine plastic litter. Full article

As science journalism is growing in importance and reader interest, the social media platform Instagram provides new opportunities for media organizations to distribute scientific content. The growing danger of fake news and misinformation, as well as the ongoing pandemic and trends in media consumption patterns, make it increasingly necessary for science journalists to deliver reliable content in a well-designed manner on digital platforms. This study investigates how German media companies and individual journalists inform lay audiences on new publications, findings, and developments in sciences, using the platform Instagram. A representative quantitative content analysis of Instagram posts (n = 2.605) of nine wide-ranging German accounts related to science journalism shows that the three analyzed groups (public service media outlets, private outlets, and individual journalists) pursue significantly different approaches in how they communicate scientific content on Instagram—ranging from informative to entertaining posts—varying in their text length, the complexity of the media elements used, and the tone of voice. The results shed light on a diversification of journalistic approaches to communicating scientific content on Instagram, as well as which approaches seem fruitful. Thereby, the nature of the media organization influences the complexity, design, and purpose of their science communication on Instagram. Full article