• International Journal of Contents
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.48-64
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• 2021

This study examines mobile news engagement-conceptualized as news exposure and participation-in the context of South Asia which has experienced tremendous growth in mobile-Internet users without receiving much attention from communication scholars. Along with demographic characteristics, this research incorporates motivational factors (grounded on uses and gratifications-U&G-approach) and news type preferences to explore their roles in mobile news engagement among urban citizens in Bangladesh. Results of a self-administered survey (N = 504) revealed that participants' mobile news engagement partially varied depending on their demographic differences, particularly gender, age, and education. Our study also unveiled that individuals' motivation for sharing information seemed to be a strong predictor of mobile news exposure and participation. In addition, Bangladeshi respondents were more likely to be interested in the hard news in terms of expressing views on news comments and sharing news via mobile platform. Conversely, preference for soft type news had a significant influence on news exposure through mobile browsing. This study provides insights into the understanding of global phenomena of mobile news engagement by unpacking the case of Bangladesh where mobile news usage seems to be an evolving state.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.28 no.1
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• pp.197-216
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• 2022

With the development of Internet and mobile technology and the spread of social media, a large amount of information is being generated and distributed online. Some of them are useful information for the public, but others are misleading information. The misleading information, so-called 'fake news', has been causing great harm to our society in recent years. Since the global spread of COVID-19 in 2020, much of fake news has been distributed online. Unlike other fake news, fake news related to COVID-19 can threaten people's health and even their lives. Therefore, intelligent technology that automatically detects and prevents fake news related to COVID-19 is a meaningful research topic to improve social health. Fake news related to COVID-19 has spread rapidly through social media, however, there have been few studies in Korea that proposed intelligent fake news detection using the information about how the fake news spreads through social media. Under this background, we propose a novel model that uses Graph2vec, one of the graph embedding methods, to effectively detect fake news related to COVID-19. The mainstream approaches of fake news detection have focused on news content, i.e., characteristics of the text, but the proposed model in this study can exploit information transmission relationships in social engagement networks when detecting fake news related to COVID-19. Experiments using a real-world data set have shown that our proposed model outperforms traditional models from the perspectives of prediction accuracy.

• Asian Journal for Public Opinion Research
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.246-264
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• 2020

As netizens increasingly utilize social media to obtain and engage with information, this study aims to determine the extent to which the follower-influencer interaction is manifested and strengthened. To analyze information related to the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19), a total of 62,119 online posts from 11 Internet forums were examined to find a relationship between followers and influencers in Taiwan. These forums are PTT, SOGO, Ck101, Plurk, Mobile01, TalkFetnet, Gamez, PlaySport, Dcard, Eyny, and PCDVD. The variables that were the best predictors of influencer classification were strong influences, engagements, and hot values across 11 Internet forums. Learning the response to the COVID-19 pandemic is vital because public actions could have been fueled by stigmatizing terms that may harm public health and well-being. The results questioned the conventional diffusion of traditional news sources because the influencers brought widespread attention to the health threat issues in the early outbreak stages. This study enhances the understanding of forum types, follower engagement, and influencers' impact maximization in social networks. The conclusion provides insight into the relationships and information diffusion mechanisms to ensure accurate health information dissemination.

• Fashion, Industry and Education
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.46-55
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• 2018

The purpose of this exploratory study was to enhance the understanding of how brands tilize emojis in their marketing practices. A content analysis was conducted utilizing Google News as a search tool to access articles containing information pertaining to the use of emojis by brands. The combination of keywords used for the search were "emoji", "business", and "marketing". The search was narrowed down to the period of January $1^{st}$, 2014 - November $29^{th}$, 2017. This method generated a total of 604 trade publications with 55 of them providing information pertaining to specific brands and their use of emojis in their marketing strategies. A content analysis of trade publications has revealed that a variety of marketers have utilized emojis in their brand marketing practices. The entertainment, service, and food/drink industries have predominantly utilized emojis in their marketing practices, and their primary purpose for using emojis was to increase consumer engagement. Brands applied most of these emoji marketing strategies to an online or digital setting, whether it was social media pages, mobile applications, or any other form of computer-based marketing. Although there are limitations to this exploratory research in terms of its methodology, the findings of this study provide interesting insights into the potential of emojis as a marketing tool.