Brief reportJournal Club: Twitter as a source of vaccination information: Content drivers and what they're saying
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
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Cited by (6)
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2021, Computers in Human BehaviorCitation 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, VaccineCitation 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 CommunicationsTeaching Millennials: A Three-Year Review of the Use of Twitter in Undergraduate Health Education
2017, Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular CultureToward a mixed-methods research approach to content analysis in the digital age: The combined content-analysis model and its applications to health care twitter feeds
2016, Journal of Medical Internet Research
Conflicts of interest: None to report.