Event-driven dynamics, regional disparities, and netizen engagement: characterizing and exploring malaria discourse on Sina Weibo for enhanced health communication

作者：Ning Wang, Xu Zhao, Chengyuan Li, Yuanchun Mao · 发表于：Malaria Journal · 年份：2025 · DOI：10.1186/s12936-025-05664-4 · 被引用次数：1 · 研究领域：Malaria Research and Control、International Development and Aid、Global Security and Public Health

BACKGROUND: Malaria remains a major global health concern. Although China was certified malaria-free, imported cases have continued to emerge in recent years, and public awareness of the disease remains limited. As a major social media platform in China, Sina Weibo provides a large volume of malaria-related textual data suitable for analysing public discussion patterns and attention focus online. This study analysed discussions on Sina Weibo to help relevant institutions understand the netizens' key concerns and level of awareness regarding malaria. By characterizing discourse patterns and exploring underlying dynamics, the findings aim to inform the design of more targeted and effective health communication strategies, ultimately enhancing netizen awareness of malaria prevention and promoting a deeper understanding of relevant knowledge. METHOD: Using "malaria" as the keyword, relevant posts from Sina Weibo were collected between January 2019 and August 2024. Guided by the social media analysis framework, descriptive analyses and natural language processing techniques-including topic modelling, sentiment analysis, and named entity recognition-were conducted to systematically analyze netizen attention and discussion patterns related to malaria across temporal, spatial, and netizen-type dimensions. RESULTS: A total of 81,010 malaria-related posts were collected. Netizens' attention to malaria is event-driven, with peaks around China's health assistance to Africa, public health...