Brief reportTwitter as a source of vaccination information: Content drivers and what they are saying
Section snippets
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.