When the clock chimes: The impact of on-the-hour effects on user anxiety content generation in social media platforms

Background: The growth of social media platforms has created a plethora of user-generated content, and social media has become an important channel of users to express their emotions. Although many studies have explored the influencing factors on user-generated content, there is an insufficient understanding the impact temporal cues on mental health content generation.Objective: This study aimed to explore how the on-the-hour time points affect users' anxiety content generation on social media platforms. Further, this study investigates the difference between weekdays and weekends, and the moderating effects of regional economic levels.Methods: We collected information on 2,543,902 user-generated anxiety-related posts from a leading social media platform in China. Then, we used fixed effect models to analyze the relationship between on-the-hour time points and user anxiety content generation.Results: The results show that on-the-hour time points affect user anxiety-related content generation, especially at the beginning of each hour (beta = 894.564, p < 0.01). And the impact is greater on weekdays (beta = 774.695, p < 0.01) than on weekends (beta = 119.869, p < 0.01). Furthermore, regional economic moderates the impact, the better the economic condition, the greater the impact.Limitations: Limitations include incomplete coverage of patient types and a single anxiety dictionary.Conclusions: This study uncovers the relationship between temporal cues and user-generated anxiety content, providing new insights into the mental illness observation, and provides insights for mental health services providers and designers of online social platforms.