Online Vaccination Discussion and Communities in Twitter
Figure1: Steps used in our study to unveil the communication patterns of pro-vaccine and anti-vaccine users on Twitter |
Abstract:
Many states in the US allow a “belief exemption” for measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccines. People’s opinion on whether or not to take the vaccine could have direct consequences in public health— once the vaccine refusal of a group within a population is higher than what herd immunity can tolerate, a disease can transmit fast causing large scale of disease outbreaks. Social media has been one of the dominant communication channels for people to express their opinions of vaccination. Despite governmental organizations’ effects of disseminating information of vaccination benefits, anti-vaccine sentiment is still gaining its momentum, especially on social media. This research investigates the communicative patterns of anti-vaccine and pro-vaccine users on Twitter by studying the retweet network from 660,892 tweets related to MMR vaccine published by 269,623 users after the 2015 California Disneyland measles outbreak. Using supervised learning, we classified the users into anti-vaccination, neutral to vaccination, and pro-vaccination groups. Using a combination of opinion groups and retweet network structural community detection, we discovered that pro- and anti-vaccine users retweet predominantly from their own opinion group, while users with neutral opinions are distributed across communities. For most cross-group communication, it was found that pro-vaccination users were retweeting anti-vaccination users than vice-versa. The paper concludes that anti-vaccine Twitter users are highly clustered and enclosed communities, and this makes it difficult for health organizations to penetrate and counter opinionated information. We believe that this finding may be useful in developing strategies for health communication of vaccination and overcome some the limits of current strategies.
Key Words: Anti-vaccine movement, Twitter, social media, opinion classification
Figure 2: Network visualizations of the four largest communities. A: is colored by the belonging to a specific structural community and; B: is colored by belonging to opinion groups |
Figure 3: Distributions of opinion groups in the four largest structural community |
Full Reference:
Yuan, X. and Crooks, A.T. (2018), Examining Online Vaccination Discussion and Communities in Twitter, Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Social Media and Society, Copenhagen, Denmark, pp 197-206. (pdf)