A new study found that health-related posts that feature K-pop stars, most notably BTS, attract more responses from the general public and have a higher chance of going viral than those that do not.
Key details: Published in Online Social Networks and Media in September, the study, led by Herbert Chang, an assistant professor of quantitative social science at Dartmouth College, looked into how K-pop stars helped further spread health-related messages to the public during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 to 2021.
Joining Chang in the study is Emilio Ferrara, a professor of computer science and communication at the University of Southern California, and Becky Pham, a USC doctoral candidate.
Their study: During the study, Chang and his co-authors analyzed around 7 million posts related to mask-wearing and K-pop posted by X users, formerly Twitter, between March 2020 and December 2021. Those 7 million posts were extracted from a massive dataset of 3.5 billion posts using natural language processing methods.
How they did it: Through a selection of keywords, the group refined the dataset into subsets that were specific to their study, such as posts with the #WearAMask hashtag, posts from important institutions and figures like World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and posts containing K-pop hashtags like #BTS and #BTSArmy.
Besides BTS, Chang and the group also examined posts about BLACKPINK and Twice, noting in the study that they are the “three most prominent K-pop groups on Twitter.”
Their findings: The group discovered that health-related posts featuring K-pop stars received more responses from countries often underserved by Western-based health organizations, such as South America, Central America and Southeast Asia, than posts that did not contain K-pop keywords.
In one of the graphs in the study, the group highlighted that posts with “K-pop” and “Dr. Tedros” as keywords were more popular in Indonesia,…
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