Evolutionary Trend of Dental Health Care Information on Chinese Social Media Platforms During 2018-2022: Retrospective Observational Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Social media holds an increasingly significant position in contemporary society, wherein evolving public perspectives are mirrored by changing information. However, there remains a lack of comprehensive analysis regarding the nature and evolution of dental health care information on Chinese social media platforms (SMPs) despite extensive user engagement and voluminous content. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to probe into the nature and evolution of dental health care information on Chinese SMPs from 2018 to 2022, providing valuable insights into the evolving digital public perception of dental health for dental practitioners, investigators, and educators. METHODS: This study was conducted on 3 major Chinese SMPs: Weibo, WeChat, and Zhihu. Data from March 1 to 31 in 2018, 2020, and 2022 were sampled to construct a social media original database (ODB), from which the most popular long-text posts (N=180) were selected to create an analysis database (ADB). Natural language processing (NLP) tools were used to assist tracking topic trends, and word frequencies were analyzed. The DISCERN health information quality assessment questionnaire was used for information quality evaluation. RESULTS: The number of Weibo posts in the ODB increased approximately fourfold during the observation period, with discussion of orthodontic topics showing the fastest growth, surpassing that of general dentistry after 2020. In the ADB, the engagement of content on Weibo and Zhihu also displayed an upward trend. The overall information quality of long-text posts on the 3 platforms was moderate or low. Of the long-text posts, 143 (79.4%) were written by nonprofessionals, and 105 (58.3%) shared personal medical experiences. On Weibo and WeChat, long-text posts authored by health care professionals had higher DISCERN scores (Weibo P=.04; WeChat P=.02), but there was a negative correlation between engagement and DISCERN scores (Weibo tau-b [τb]=-0.45, P=.01; WeChat τb=-0.30, P=.02). CONCLUSIONS: There was a significant increase in the dissemination and evolution of public interest in dental health care information on Chinese social media during 2018-2022. However, the quality of the most popular long-text posts was rated as moderate or low, which may mislead patients and the public.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".