Brief report
Journal Club: Twitter as a source of vaccination information: Content drivers and what they're saying

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajic.2013.02.003Get rights and content

This Journal Club reviews a study on the use of Twitter as a source of health-related information.

Section snippets

Methods

To answer the question, the authors collected publicly available Twitter messages (ie, tweets) containing a keyword related to vaccination (eg, vaccine, vaccination, immunization) for 7 sequential days in January 2012, using the network analysis tool NodeXL. This tool is not described by the authors but is an add-on template for Microsoft Excel “that encourages interactive overview, discovery, and exploration through direct data manipulation, graphing, and visualization.”4 The search found

Results

The authors reported that no particular subject, source, or user dominated the Twitter conversation. Overall, one-third of the 2,580 tweets were positive regarding vaccines, 54% were neutral, and 13% were negative, the latter consisting of claims about alleged dangers. The most frequent topics related to development of new vaccines, vaccine effectiveness, and vaccine recommendations. Medical knowledge was included in 369 tweets, and the majority offered substantiated content. Medical claims

Discussion

This study contributes to the growing body of evidence demonstrating that social media is a method of communication that is changing the way individuals transmit and receive health related information. The study findings, while not generalizable, confirm the use of microblogging among informal social networks such as Twitter, for dissemination of both valid and invalid vaccination information and/or advice. This has important clinical implications especially because antivaccine groups have

References (5)

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Cited by (6)

  • Identifying the features of ProVax and NoVax groups from social media conversations

    2021, Computers in Human Behavior
    Citation Excerpt :

    Their results showed that vaccine information within social media platforms can influence parental vaccine behaviors (Grant et al., 2015). showed that vaccine-skeptical websites create communities of people affected by vaccines and vaccine-related practices and they disseminate misinformation by challenging the information available in scientific literature and government documents (Manning & Davis, 2013). focused on Twitter conversations and highlighted that social media are changing the way individuals transmit and receive health related information and that this scenario has important clinical implications especially because anti-vaccine groups have embraced social media technologies to effectively spread their messages (Lyson et al., 2018).

  • Interventions to Improve Adolescent Vaccination: What May Work and What Still Needs to Be Tested

    2015, Vaccine
    Citation Excerpt :

    Surprisingly, exposure to “positive” blogs had no effect when compared with controls. This work, combined with that focused on vaccination in other populations [60–74], supports the notion that web-based social media can play a powerful role in mediating vaccination intentions and decisions. Social marketing is a “process that applies traditional marketing principles and techniques to influence target audience behaviors that benefit society as well as the individual.”[75]

  • Untangling between fake-news and truth in social media to understand the Covid-19 Coronavirus

    2020, Proceedings - IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications

Conflicts of interest: None to report.

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