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The Rohingya crisis has been a significant issue for national and international news media, capturing their attention for an extended period and documenting various phases of the crisis. Previous research exploring the tones and portrayal of the Rohingyas in the news lacks comparative and temporal analysis of news sentiments. In this study, we aim to fill this gap by analyzing 8074 news stories on Rohingya issues published in 10 news media outlets from 10 countries between 2009 and 2023. Our computational sentiment analysis reveals that Rohingya-related news sentiments are predominantly negative and fluctuate over the years across different countries, showing little identifiable patterns. An ANOVA suggests significant variation in news sentiments among countries, with some countries exhibiting more similar sentiments than others, thus creating distinguishable groups. Some of our findings contradict previous scholarships, warranting further research and novel frameworks. Additionally, we encourage scrutiny of academic insights to address potential biases against news media’s journalistic integrity.

This dataset comprises Facebook data on five cases of religious misinformation in Bangladesh. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first publicly accessible dataset on Facebook-based religious misinformation in the country, featuring 7350 comments contributed by unique users. As online religious misinformation has been implicated in causing interreligious violence and tension in Bangladesh, this dataset can offer crucial insights into how social media is being exploited to foment such events. It may also help advance policy reform and activism to protect human rights and prevent the spread of religious misinformation.

This study endeavors to answer four research questions: (a) Who are the celebrities? (b) How popular are they? (c) What do they post on social media platforms? (d) How do their followers react to them? Following quantitative methods, this study analyzes the top 195 Facebook celebrities of Bangladesh and their 9,441 Facebook posts’ interactions. The result suggests that actors, music-related celebrities, and sports stars are the most popular celebrities. While male celebrities have a higher frequency, female celebrities have higher average followers than their male counterparts. Celebrities mostly share photos on Facebook, perhaps to recreate their public images and provide regular updates to their followers. The followers also engage the most in photos with affection and surprise reactions. Their reactions to celebrities’ Facebook content are highly positive. Some strengths and limitations of this study are also discussed.

Although rape is prevalent in Bangladesh, we have limited knowledge about how the media reports rape news. This study analyzed 10,191 headlines of rape news shared on ten Bangladeshi media's Facebook pages between 2013 and 2021. The aim was to investigate the media's rape news-sharing behavior by exploring the frequent topics of rape news. Following a computer-assisted textual analysis of the Bangla news headlines, this study found that media outlets share rape news on social media that is more likely to contain issues related to rape victims and judicial processes of rape crime. The news headlines provide information about rape victims, indicating their age groups and relations (e.g., teenager, young lady, girl, woman, wife), along with information about judicial processes (e.g., case, arrest, complaint, remand). The analysis further explored other prevalent topics in rape news that the media emphasizes, such as the elements used in rape (e.g., the promise of love and marriage, private video), the act of raping (e.g., tying, forcing, blackmailing, confining), and the places, states, and time of rape (e.g., alone, home, field). This study contributes to the theoretical understanding of news-sharing behavior, gender-based violence, and media framing of rape issues. It also offers methodological guidance to semi-automated social media text analysis for the Bangla language.

Purpose – This paper aims to understand the popular themes of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)-related online misinformation in Bangladesh and to provide some suggestions to abate the problem. Design/methodology/approach – This paper discusses online COVID-19-related misinformation in Bangladesh. Following thematic analyses, the paper discusses some dominant misinformation themes based on the data collected from three fact-checking websites of Bangladesh run by media professionals and scholars. Findings – COVID-19-related online misinformation in Bangladesh has six popular themes: health, political, religious, crime, entertainment and miscellaneous. To curb misinformation, many initiatives have been taken so far that have produced little success. This paper briefly proposes the implementation of an experimental two-way misinformation prevention technique for a better result. Originality/value – Acknowledging previous initiatives, this paper discusses the major themes and offers additional solutions to reduce online misinformation which would benefit academics as well as policymakers.

Purpose The main purposes of this study were to analyze the document types and languages of published papers on coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), along with the top authors, publications, countries, institutions, and disciplines, and to analyze the co-occurrence of keywords and bibliographic coupling of countries and sources of the most-cited COVID-19 literature. Methods This study analyzed 16,384 COVID-19 studies published between December 2019 and June 2020. The data were extracted from the Web of Science database using four keywords: “COVID-19,” “coronavirus,” “2019-nCoV,” and “SARS-CoV-2.” The top 500 mostcited documents were analyzed for bibliographic and citation network visualization. Results The studies were published in 19 different languages, and English (95.313%) was the most common. Of 157 research-producing countries, the United States (25.433%) was in the leading position. Wang Y (n=94) was the top author, and the BMJ (n=488) was the top source. The University of London (n=488) was the leading organization, and medicine-related papers (n=2,259) accounted for the highest proportion. The co-occurrence of keywords analysis identified “coronavirus,” “COVID-19,” “SARS-CoV-2,” “2019-nCoV,” and “pneumonia” as the most frequent words. The bibliographic coupling analysis of countries and sources showed the strongest collaborative links between China and the United States and between the New England Journal of Medicine and the JAMA. Conclusion Collaboration between the United States and China was key in COVID-19 research during this period. Although BMJ was the leading title for COVID-19 articles, the co-author link between New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA was the strongest.

India has recently become a hotspot of misinformation: the COVID-19 brings a new opportunity for the rumor-spreaders. Of various categories, religious misinformation seems harmful for both Indian society and public health. In this paper, therefore, I tried to sketch a few necessary aspects of religious misinformation in India during the COVID-19. From the previous literature and ongoing trend of Indian misinformation, I identified two important phenomena: (a) Though Muslims produce more spiritual misinformation, most of the religious misinformation targeting Muslims is inspired by Islamophobia; (b) misinformation that tries to champion Hinduism is more related to the contemporary political ideologies of India. I also tried to explain how religion as a political issue relates to public health

Based on the conceptual framework of social mediatization of religion, this paper seeks to understand three pertinent phenomena: trends of online religious content, users' engagement with them, and correlations between interaction indicators. To answer the research inquiries, we quantitatively analyzed 73,120 Islamic videos uploaded on YouTube in 2011–2020. The result shows that Islamic videos on YouTube are growing continuously without any decline, from 6.04% in 2011 to 13.11% in 2019, more than two-fold in eight years. Also, with a strong positive correlation, comments and likes (r = .862; p < .01) are increasing at a remarkable rate than the other interaction variables. We observed that users who watch Islamic videos are more likely to like the videos than to dislike them. Users' engagement is not related to the length of Islamic videos in any significant way. These two results partly suggest users' positive and supportive attitudes toward online Islamic videos. Finally, this study recommends investigating the thematic temporal distribution of Islamic videos for an in-depth understanding of the users’ topical interest patterns.

This study investigated 3.50 million Facebook reactions collected from 9,429 Bangladeshi news items about rape shared on social media from 2016 to 2021. The primary aim of this study was to understand users' different reaction patterns based on the five major Facebook reactions (i.e., *love*, *haha*, *wow*, *sad*, and *angry*). Based on the theories of emotion, we quantitatively answer one research question: How do social media users react to rape with the five major Facebook reactions? The results suggest that users are more likely to express disdain toward rape and sympathy toward the victims using Facebook reactions by using the *angry* button, along with the *sad* button. In rape news, both reactions are consistent and maintain a strong positive correlation, meaning they increase and decrease together. Although many users tend to mock and laugh at rape incidents and the victims, trend lines suggest that such expressions may not be consistent with time. Despite contextual relevance, we presume that in socially and morally unacceptable events like rape and war, the valences of reactions alter to some extent: angry and sad usually become positive, while *love*, *wow*, and *haha* become negative. Some strengths and limitations of the study are discussed as well.

This study analyzes N=181 social media rumors from Bangladesh to find out the most popular themes, sources, and aims. The result shows that social media rumors have seven popular themes: political, health & education, crime & human rights, religious, religiopolitical, entertainment, and other. Also, online media and mainstream media are the two main sources of social media rumors, along with three tentative aims: positive, negative, and unknown. A few major findings of this research are: Political rumors dominate social media, but its percentage is decreasing, while religion-related rumors are increasing; most of the social media rumors are negative and emerge from online media, and social media itself is the dominant online source of social media rumors; and, most of the health-related rumors are negative and surge during a crisis period, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper identifies some of its limitations with the data collection period, data source, and data analysis. Providing a few research directions, this study also elucidates the contributions of its results in academia and policymaking.

Background: Facebook, as the world’s most popular social media platform, has been playing various important roles throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, allowing users to produce and share health-related information that both eases and complicates public health communication. However, the characteristics of vaccine-related Facebook content and users’ reaction to the vaccine issue has been an unexplored area to date. Methods: To fill the previous knowledge-gap, this exploratory study wants to understand the communication climate of Facebook on the COVID-19 vaccine issue, including the nature of dominant content and users’ engagement patterns with them. Therefore, the study analyzes the 10,000 most popular Facebook posts with the highest interactions on the vaccine issue. Results: The results show that Facebook users prioritize more vaccine-related news links (71.22%) over other content. The declining interactions on the issue suggests that interaction growth mainly depends on positive news on the vaccine. Finally, users’ reaction to the vaccine issue is dominantly positive, though they may show a highly negative attitude toward vaccine misinformation. Conclusions: A few limitations and strengths of this study are discussed along with values and implications. This study for the first time analyzes Bangla language-based Facebook content related to the COVID-19 vaccine issue, which is largely overlooked in global academic research.

The COVID-19 pandemic has claimed a lot of lives around the world, not only with the virus but also with misinformation. Many researchers have investigated COVID-19 misinformation, but none of them was related to social media users’ diverse responses to different types of COVID-19 misinformation, which could be a timely exploration. To bridge this gap in scholarly literature, the present study based on 11,716 comments from 876 Facebook posts on five COVID-19 misinformation seeks to answer two relevant research questions: (a) How ignorant social media users are about misinformation? (b) How do they react to different types of misinformation? Following a quantitative content analysis method, this study produces a few novel findings. The results show that most of the users trust misinformation (60.88%), and fewer can deny (16.15%) or doubt (13.30%) the claims based on proper reasons. The acceptance of religious misinformation (94.72%) surpassed other types of misinformation. Most of the users react happily (34.50%) to misinformation: the users who accept misinformation are mostly happy (55.02%) because it may satisfy their expectations, and the users who distrust misinformation are mostly angry (44.05%) presuming it may cause harm to people. The chi-square and phi coefficient values show strong positive and significant associations between the themes, levels of ignorance, and reactions to misinformation. Some strengths, limitations, and ethical concerns of this study have also been discussed.

This study analyzes 419 fake news items published in India, a fake-news-prone country, to identify the major themes, content types, and sources of social media fake news. The results show that fake news shared on social media has six major themes: health, religion, politics, crime, entertainment, and miscellaneous; eight types of content: text, photo, audio, and video, text & photo, text & video, photo & video, and text & photo & video; and two main sources: online sources and the mainstream media. Health-related fake news is more common only during a health crisis, whereas fake news related to religion and politics seems more prevalent, emerging from online media. Text & photo and text & video have three-fourths of the total share of fake news, and most of them are from online media: online media is the main source of fake news on social media as well. On the other hand, mainstream media mostly produces political fake news. This study, presenting some novel findings that may help researchers to understand and policymakers to control fake news on social media, invites more academic investigations of religious and political fake news in India. Two important limitations of this study are related to the data source and data collection period, which may have an impact on the results.

Due to various social advancements, Bangladesh has become more welcoming to digital technologies. Thus, a significant online community is flourishing here. Almost half of the country’s entire population uses the internet. The digital neighborhood is becoming larger the mediated interaction. What we now call online is nothing but a reflection of offline except its physicality. Like other social phenomena, religion and religious discourse is also a part of cyber society. Belief in cyberspace is often dubbed as “cyber-religionâ€. Debates on religion often harm the opposite group and contend faiths transform peace into communal animosity beyond cyberspace. Thus, society gets heated by hostile collective performances. In contemporary Bangladesh, online piety is an exclusive phenomenon that has considerable importance. By observing the dynamics of online religiosity, this paper focusing more on social media tries to present a concise overview of digital Islam(ism) and the social psychology of online Islamic piety in the context of Bangladesh.

The growing significance of social media in research demands new ethical standards and practices. Although a substantial body of literature on social media ethics exists, studies on the ethics of conducting research using social media are scarce. The emergence of new evidence sources, like social media, requires innovative methods and renewed consideration of research ethics. Therefore, we pose the following question: What are the defining characteristics of ethics papers on social media research? Following a modified version of the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) protocol, we analyzed 34 publications based on ten variables: author gender, publication year, region, academic discipline, type, design, methodology, social media platform in focus, positionality statement, and ethical issues. Our findings suggest contemporary social media research ethics primarily reflects the ethical ideals of the Global North, with limited representation from the Global South. Women authors have published more papers than men authors. Previous studies have prioritized ethical concerns such as privacy, informed consent, and anonymity while overlooking researchers' risks and the ethics of social media sites. We particularly emphasized the lack of researchers' positionality statements in research. Our findings will pave the way to understanding social media ethics better, especially with the rapid growth of social media research in global scholarship.

Background: Facebook, as the world’s most popular social media platform, has been playing various important roles throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, allowing users to produce and share health-related information that both eases and complicates public health communication. However, the characteristics of vaccine-related Facebook content and users’ reaction to the vaccine issue has been an unexplored area to date. Methods: To fill the previous knowledge-gap, this exploratory study wants to understand the communication climate of Facebook on the COVID-19 vaccine issue, including the nature of dominant content and users’ engagement patterns with them. Therefore, the study analyzes the 10,000 most popular Facebook posts with the highest interactions on the vaccine issue. Results: The results show that Facebook users prioritize more vaccine-related news links (71.22%) over other content. The declining interactions on the issue suggests that interaction growth mainly depends on positive news on the vaccine. Finally, users’ reaction to the vaccine issue is dominantly positive, though they may show a highly negative attitude toward vaccine misinformation. Conclusions: A few limitations and strengths of this study are discussed along with values and implications. This study for the first time analyzes Bangla language-based Facebook content related to the COVID-19 vaccine issue, which is largely overlooked in global academic research.

Background: Facebook, as the world’s most popular social media platform, has been playing various important roles throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, allowing users to produce and share health-related information that both eases and complicates public health communication. However, the characteristics of vaccine-related Facebook content and users’ reaction to the vaccine issue has been an unexplored area to date. Methods: To fill the previous knowledge-gap, this exploratory study wants to understand the communication climate of Facebook on the COVID-19 vaccine issue, including the nature of dominant content and users’ engagement patterns with them. Therefore, the study analyzes the 10,000 most popular Facebook posts with the highest interactions on the vaccine issue. Results: The results show that Facebook users prioritize more vaccine-related news links (71.22%) over other content. The declining interactions on the issue suggests that interaction growth mainly depends on positive news on the vaccine. Finally, users’ reaction to the vaccine issue is dominantly positive, though they may show a highly negative attitude toward vaccine misinformation. Conclusions: A few limitations and strengths of this study are discussed along with values and implications. This study for the first time analyzes Bangla language-based Facebook content related to the COVID-19 vaccine issue, which is largely overlooked in global academic research.