The Impact of Comment Slant and Comment Tone on Digital Health Communication Among Polarized Publics: A Web-Based Survey Experiment.

Résumé

BACKGROUND: Public attitudes toward health issues are becoming increasingly polarized, as seen in social media comments, which vary from supportive to oppositional and frequently include uncivil language. The combined effects of comment slant and comment tone on health behavior among a polarized public need further examination.OBJECTIVE: This study aims to examine how social media users' prior attitudes toward mask wearing and their exposure to a mask-wearing-promoting post, synchronized with polarized and hostile discussions, affect their compliance with mask wearing.METHODS: The study was a web-based survey experiment with participants recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk. A total of 522 participants provided consent and completed the study. Participants were assigned to read a fictitious mask-wearing-promoting social media post with either civil anti-mask-wearing comments (130/522, 24.9%), civil pro-mask-wearing comments (129/522, 24.7%), uncivil anti-mask-wearing comments (131/522, 25.1%), or uncivil pro-mask-wearing comments (132/522, 25.3%). Following this, the participants were asked to complete self-assessed questionnaires. The PROCESS macro in SPSS (model 12; IBM Corp) was used to test the 3-way interaction effects between comment slant, comment tone, and prior attitudes on participants' presumed influence from the post and their behavioral intention to comply with mask-wearing.RESULTS: Anti-mask-wearing comments led social media users to presume less influence about others' acceptance of masks (B=1.49; P