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Dropping in, Helping Out: Social Support and Weak Ties on Traditional Medicine Social Networking Sites

Abstract This exploratory study analyses the network mechanisms with which Vietnamese traditional medical knowledge propagates on Facebook and explores patterns of social support provided by weak ties on these sites. The study employs a mixed-method multiple case study approach. Social network analysis is conducted on a sample of 6,293 original posts and 23,333 associated comments on two Vietnamese traditional medicine sites on Facebook, over three years. Content analysis is performed on a subsample of 2,570 comments made by nodes with a degree of one, together with 1,543 associated original posts. Findings indicate that weak ties are much more prevalent among discourse communities where communicative exchanges lie outside existing regulatory frameworks concerning traditional medicine. An overwhelming majority of these weak ties provide mostly informational support, while other forms of support such as emotional, esteem, network, or tangible are much less prevalent. This study suggests that weak ties play an important role in providing action-facilitating support, particularly within discourse networks that are outside of the current Vietnamese regulatory frameworks on traditional medicine. Community detection techniques performed on the dataset also show that discourse communities within networks containing more weak ties are harder to break than those containing fewer weak ties.