Youtube as a source of information on Ebola virus disease

Abstract

Background:The current West Africa epidemic of Ebola virus disease (EVD), which began from Guinea in December 2013, has been the longest and deadliest Ebola outbreak to date. With the propagation of the internet, public health officials must now compete with other official and unofficial sources of information to get their message out.Aims:This study aimed at critically appraising videos available on one popular internet video site (YouTube) as a source of information for Ebola virus disease (EVD).Materials and Methods:Videos were searched in YouTube (http://www.youtube.com) using the keyword “Ebola outbreak” from inception to November 1, 2014 with the default “relevance” filter. Only videos in English language under 10 min duration within first 10 pages of search were included. Duplicates were removed and the rest were classified as useful or misleading by two independent reviewers. Video sources were categorized by source. Inter-observer agreement was evaluated with kappa coefficient. Continuous and categorical variables were analyzed using the Student t-test and Chi-squared test, respectively.Results:One hundred and eighteen out of 198 videos were evaluated. Thirty-one (26.27%) videos were classified as misleading and 87 (73.73%) videos were classified as useful. The kappa coefficient of agreement regarding the usefulness of the videos was 0.68 (P < 0.001). Independent users were more likely to post misleading videos (93.55% vs 29.89%, OR = 34.02, 95% CI = 7.55-153.12, P < 0.001) whereas news agencies were most likely to post useful videos (65.52% vs 3.23%, OR = 57.00, 95% CI = 7.40-438.74, P < 0.001).Conclusions:This study demonstrates that majority of the internet videos about Ebola on YouTube were characterized as useful. Although YouTube seems to generally be a useful source of information on the current outbreak, increased efforts to disseminate scientifically correct information is desired to prevent unnecessary panic among the among the general population.

Qualitative analysis of Parkinson’s disease information on social media: the case of YouTube™

“…Overall, 15% of PD videos were found to be somewhat useful and only 4% were assessed as providing very useful PD information. This finding is consistent with previous studies examining the quality of YouTube™ videos relating to several medical conditions [7][8][9][10]12]. Personal users uploaded the majority of reviewed videos (66%).…”

“…YouTube™, for example, has been shown to serve as a rather popular and appealing source of freely available information for a variety of emerging (e.g. H1N1 influenza [7] and Ebola virus disease [8]), acute (e.g. nephrolithiasis [9]), and chronic (e.g.…”

Social media and outbreaks of emerging infectious diseases: A systematic review of literature

“…42 (See Table 3 for a summary of these studies in terms of EID studied, social media studied, theory applied, method used, and major findings.) 13 Biswas, 3 Chew and Eysenbach, 14 Collier et al, 15 Ding and Zhang, 16 Freberg et al, 9 Gao et al, 17 Kim and Liu, 18 Liu and Kim, 19 Luoma-aho et al, 20 Nerlich and Koteyko, 21 Pandey et al, 22 Signorini et al, 23 Tausczik et al, 24 Tirkkonen and Luoma-aho 25 Ebola virus 10 Basch et al, 26 Househ, 27 Lazard et al, 28 Nagpal et al, 29 Odlum and Yoon, 30 Pathak et al, 31 Seltzer et al, 32 Strekalova, 33 Towers et al, 34 Wong et al 35 H7N9 (bird flu/avian flu) 2 Fung et al, 36…”

“…In general, approximately 70%-80% of videos contained useful information (either accurate medical information or outbreak updates) across different EIDs, such as West Nile virus, 38 H1N1, 22 and Ebola. 31 Some studies further examined the types of medical information included in these YouTube videos, such as modes of transmission, screening, treatment, and symptoms. 26,29,38 Very often, these studies tried to establish the relationship between content characteristics and popularity of videos.…”

YouTube como fuente de información sanitaria y divulgación del conocimiento sobre Cuidados Paliativos en el domicilio

“…El estudio demuestra que la mayoría de vídeos de Internet acerca de los cuidados paliativos en el domicilio ha encontrado, en general, resultados similares a los estudios realizados, en el pasado, sobre el papel de las redes sociales, y en particular de YouTube, como fuente de información en salud pública, como el brote epidémico del virus Ébola (19), la gripe H1N1 (20) y la inmunización (21) que se caracterizaron, en general, por una información de pobre calidad o irrelevante, e incluso en ocasiones engañosa, solo algunos vídeos contienen información de alta calidad.…”