Chinese Social Media Reaction to Information about 42 Notifiable Infectious Diseases

Abstract

This study aimed to identify what information triggered social media users’ responses regarding infectious diseases. Chinese microblogs in 2012 regarding 42 infectious diseases were obtained through a keyword search in the Weiboscope database. Qualitative content analysis was performed for the posts pertinent to each keyword of the day of the year with the highest daily count. Similar posts were grouped and coded. We identified five categories of information that increased microblog traffic pertaining to infectious diseases: news of an outbreak or a case; health education / information; alternative health information / Traditional Chinese Medicine; commercial advertisement / entertainment; and social issues. News unrelated to the specified infectious diseases also led to elevated microblog traffic. Our study showcases the diverse contexts from which increased social media traffic occur. Our results will facilitate better health communication as causes underlying increased social media traffic are revealed.

Vaccine safety and social media in China

“…Sina Weibo is a valuable resource for health researchers because users share health-related information, 9 react to outbreak news, and express concern about poor doctor-patient relationships. 10 However, research on Sina Weibo became difficult when Sina Weibo restricted researcher access to the Application Programming Interface in 2013. Additionally, the requirement for real-name registration and government censorship made China's social media users less willing to share potentially sensitive information online 11 and complicated the future use of China's social media data for pharmacovigilance purposes.…”

Global Handwashing Day 2012: a qualitative content analysis of Chinese social media reaction to a health promotion event

“…Weibo data were collected through the Weiboscope project, as reported elsewhere. 14,18, 19 Through a systematic search of the Sina Weibo user database via the Sina Weibo Application Programming Interface (API), we generated a list of about 350 000 indexed microbloggers who had 1000 or more followers when the project began data collection in 2011. We retrieved their Weibo posts regularly via API over the year of 2012.…”

“…Among these users, around 5000 were Chinese dissident writers, journalists and scholars; another 38 000 were users with an authenticated status having more than 10 000 followers. 14, 19 The study sample constituted less than 1% of all registered users of Sina Weibo. 13 Nonetheless, the study samples represent the most influential Weibo users who contributed the most content in Weibo.…”

Utility of social media and crowd-sourced data for pharmacovigilance: a scoping review protocol

“…Recently, researchers evaluated the types of information14 including the prevalence of misinformation15 posted on Twitter and the Sina Weibo Chinese microblog platform related to the 2014–2015 Ebola epidemic. Given the observed predictive power of social media and crowd-sourced data as an information source for public health surveillance, a lot of interest has been generated about its use for surveillance of adverse events to health products, often referred to as pharmacovigilance.…”