Using Text Mining to Compare Online Pro- and Anti-Vaccine Headlines: Word Usage, Sentiments, and Online Popularity

Ren

2020

IJERPH

Text analysis has been used by scholars to research attitudes toward vaccination and is particularly timely due to the rise of medical misinformation via social media. This study uses a sample of 9581 vaccine-related tweets in the period 1 January 2019 to 5 April 2019. The time period is of the essence because during this time, a measles outbreak was prevalent throughout the United States and a public debate was raging. Sentiment analysis is applied to the sample, clustering the data into topics using the term frequency–inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) technique. The analyses suggest that most (about 77%) of the tweets focused on the search for new/better vaccines for diseases such as the Ebola virus, human papillomavirus (HPV), and the flu. Of the remainder, about half concerned the recent measles outbreak in the United States, and about half were part of ongoing debates between supporters and opponents of vaccination against measles in particular. While these numbers currently suggest a relatively small role for vaccine misinformation, the concept of herd immunity puts that role in context. Nevertheless, going forward, health experts should consider the potential for the increasing spread of falsehoods that may get firmly entrenched in the public mind.

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Studying Public Perception about Vaccination: A Sentiment Analysis of Tweets

Ren

2020

IJERPH

Social Science & Medicine

“…Some studies incorporated social network analysis or epidemiological modelling to better explain the dynamics of misinformation spread (Bessi et al, 2015;Ghenai and Mejova, 2017;Harris et al, 2014;Jin et al, 2014;Radzikowski et al, 2016;Wood, 2018). Many designs were also complemented by sentiment measures, for instance, the "antivaccine" sentiment (Bahk et al, 2016;Xu and Guo, 2018).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For instance, Basch et al (2017), Donzelli et al (2018) and Porat et al (2018) report high online prevalence and popularity of autism-related discussions in fora on vaccination. Tustin et al (2018) and Xu and Guo (2018) also reported widespread misinformation about side effects, as well as mistrust in government or pharmaceutical companies in discussions on vaccination. Krishna's (2017) study of active propagators of these messages found that those who were knowledge-deficient and vaccine-averse exhibit higher levels of activity than those who are not.…”

Section: Vaccines and Communicable Diseasesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Systematic Literature Review on the Spread of Health-related Misinformation on Social Media

Wang

McKee

Torbica

et al. 2019

1,252

806

A B S T R A C TContemporary commentators describe the current period as "an era of fake news" in which misinformation, generated intentionally or unintentionally, spreads rapidly. Although affecting all areas of life, it poses particular problems in the health arena, where it can delay or prevent effective care, in some cases threatening the lives of individuals. While examples of the rapid spread of misinformation date back to the earliest days of scientific medicine, the internet, by allowing instantaneous communication and powerful amplification has brought about a quantum change. In democracies where ideas compete in the marketplace for attention, accurate scientific information, which may be difficult to comprehend and even dull, is easily crowded out by sensationalized news. In order to uncover the current evidence and better understand the mechanism of misinformation spread, we report a systematic review of the nature and potential drivers of health-related misinformation. We searched PubMed, Cochrane, Web of Science, Scopus and Google databases to identify relevant methodological and empirical articles published between 2012 and 2018. A total of 57 articles were included for full-text analysis. Overall, we observe an increasing trend in published articles on health-related misinformation and the role of social media in its propagation. The most extensively studied topics involving misinformation relate to vaccination, Ebola and Zika Virus, although others, such as nutrition, cancer, fluoridation of water and smoking also featured. Studies adopted theoretical frameworks from psychology and network science, while co-citation analysis revealed potential for greater collaboration across fields. Most studies employed content analysis, social network analysis or experiments, drawing on disparate disciplinary paradigms. Future research should examine susceptibility of different sociodemographic groups to misinformation and understand the role of belief systems on the intention to spread misinformation. Further interdisciplinary research is also warranted to identify effective and tailored interventions to counter the spread of health-related misinformation online.

“…This is because, as mentioned above, despite the existence of numerous studies that explain the benefits of vaccination, there are still many conflicting views on pro-vaccine and anti-vaccine [ 34 ], especially having in mind more intensive use of online media and marketing campaigns in modern age. Research studies show that anti-vaccine articles are more likely to be shared, commented on, and reacted to online than pro-vaccine messages [ 35 ]. Online anti-vaccine messages may lead parents to question the safety of vaccine, distrust health professionals, and seek non-medical vaccine exemptions [ 36 , 37 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Impact of Online Media on Parents’ Attitudes toward Vaccination of Children—Social Marketing and Public Health

Melović

Stojanovic

Vulić

et al. 2020

IJERPH

The aim of this paper was to investigate the level of influence of online media on the parents’ attitudes toward vaccination of children in three countries of the Western Balkans—Montenegro, Serbia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, in order to use the potentials of this form of communication effectively and efficiently. Online media are a critical factor of influence on the formation of attitudes in many areas of modern society, which is why their proper use plays an important role in strengthening vaccine confidence and which may further contribute to improvement of public health. On the other side, having in mind the fact that communication is an integral part of marketing, it is clear that social marketing has an extremely important role regarding the analyzed topic, especially because of the fact that social marketing activities tend to change or maintain people’s behavior for the benefit of individuals and society as a whole. For the purpose of this research, a conceptual model was developed. Quantitative research was conducted online in the first quarter of 2020 using the survey method. Statistical analysis was applied to data collected from 1593 parents in the analyzed countries. The relevance of the hypotheses was tested using standard statistical tests, ANOVA test, eta coefficient, and logistic regression. The research showed that all analyzed variables from the model have a significant impact on the parents’ attitudes toward the vaccination of children and that they correlate with the degree of trust in vaccines. The results also approved that online media have a significant influence on the formation of parents’ attitudes toward the vaccination of children (obtained values of eta coefficient η2 = 0.216, η2 = 0.18, η2 = 0.167, η2 = 0.090, reliability Cronbach’s Alpha 0.892), which confirms the importance of the use of social marketing in order to direct communication properly and to strengthen the level of trust in vaccines. Additionally, the results of logistic regression showed that the following groups of parents are particularly vulnerable to the influence of online media on attitudes toward vaccines: women, parents of younger age (“millennials”), and parents who are in common law marriage, as well as parents who have more children. In addition, the results showed that there is no statistically significant difference in the attitudes of parents in the observed countries (η2 = 0.000, F = 0.85). Based on the results of the research, the authors suggest that decision makers should pay more attention to modern forms of online communication and social marketing in order to use their potential for improvement of public health, as well as avoid the harmful impact that certain forms of communication may have on the formation of attitudes and loss of confidence in vaccines. The findings provide an important contribution for public health policy makers to identify and understand properly the impact of online media and social marketing and thus to better adapt their initiatives to changes in modern society.