Brief report
Twitter as a source of vaccination information: Content drivers and what they are saying

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajic.2012.10.016Get rights and content

Twitter is a popular source of health information. This study reports a content analysis of posts about vaccinations, documenting sources, tone, and medical accuracy. Results can help explain patient knowledge and directions for educational campaigns. A set of 6,827 tweets indicates professional sources were shared most and treated positively. Two-thirds of shared medical content were substantiated. One-third of messages were positive, counter to other research and suggesting that users apply critical thinking when evaluating content.

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Methods

To analyze content driving Twitter discourse about vaccinations, this study sampled messages using the network analysis tool NodeXL (Social Media Research Foundation, Belmont, CA) to collect tweets containing a keyword related to vaccination (ie, vaccine, vaccination, immunization). This produced 9,510 tweets, from which extraneous messages were removed for a population of 6,827 English-language tweets from January 8 to 14, 2012. Messages were collected from sequential days to ensure

Results

No particular subject, source, or user dominated the conversation. Accounting for reposts, only 4 messages comprised more than 1% of posts. The most popular messages concerned the following: a potential children’s malaria vaccine (8.7%), development of the NeuVax E-75 vaccine (2.5%), a herpes vaccine’s effectiveness in women (1.5%), the Center for Disease Control’s recommendation of human papilloma virus vaccinations for boys (1.5%), potential approval of a lung cancer vaccine (<1%), and

Discussion

One-third of tweets were supportive of immunization and promoted substantiated information, particularly relating to common vaccinations. These findings run counter to other YouTube-focused research on vaccines reporting almost half of content as ambivalent toward vaccination and often in conflict with reference standards,10 all of which demonstrates the complicated and not entirely accurate picture presented through various social media.

Health-focused sites, professional media, and medical

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Conflicts of interest: None to report.

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