Adapting and Extending a Typology to Identify Vaccine Misinformation on Twitter.

Journal: American journal of public health
Published Date: Oct 1, 2020

Abstract

To adapt and extend an existing typology of vaccine misinformation to classify the major topics of discussion across the total vaccine discourse on Twitter. Using 1.8 million vaccine-relevant tweets compiled from 2014 to 2017, we adapted an existing typology to Twitter data, first in a manual content analysis and then using latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modeling to extract 100 topics from the data set. Manual annotation identified 22% of the data set as antivaccine, of which safety concerns and conspiracies were the most common themes. Seventeen percent of content was identified as provaccine, with roughly equal proportions of vaccine promotion, criticizing antivaccine beliefs, and vaccine safety and effectiveness. Of the 100 LDA topics, 48 contained provaccine sentiment and 28 contained antivaccine sentiment, with 9 containing both. Our updated typology successfully combines manual annotation with machine-learning methods to estimate the distribution of vaccine arguments, with greater detail on the most distinctive topics of discussion. With this information, communication efforts can be developed to better promote vaccines and avoid amplifying antivaccine rhetoric on Twitter.

Authors

  • Amelia Jamison
    Amelia M. Jamison, Kajal S. Parikh, and Adeena Malik are with the Maryland Center for Health Equity, School of Public Health, University of Maryland, College Park. David A. Broniatowski and Michael C. Smith are with the Department of Engineering Management and Systems Engineering, School of Engineering and Applied Science, and Institute for Data, Democracy, and Politics, The George Washington University, Washington, DC. Mark Dredze is with the Department of Computer Science, Whiting School of Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD. Sandra C. Quinn is with the Department of Family Science and Maryland Center for Health Equity, School of Public Health, University of Maryland, College Park.
  • David A Broniatowski
    Amelia M. Jamison, Kajal S. Parikh, and Adeena Malik are with the Maryland Center for Health Equity, School of Public Health, University of Maryland, College Park. David A. Broniatowski and Michael C. Smith are with the Department of Engineering Management and Systems Engineering, School of Engineering and Applied Science, and Institute for Data, Democracy, and Politics, The George Washington University, Washington, DC. Mark Dredze is with the Department of Computer Science, Whiting School of Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD. Sandra C. Quinn is with the Department of Family Science and Maryland Center for Health Equity, School of Public Health, University of Maryland, College Park.
  • Michael C Smith
    Amelia M. Jamison, Kajal S. Parikh, and Adeena Malik are with the Maryland Center for Health Equity, School of Public Health, University of Maryland, College Park. David A. Broniatowski and Michael C. Smith are with the Department of Engineering Management and Systems Engineering, School of Engineering and Applied Science, and Institute for Data, Democracy, and Politics, The George Washington University, Washington, DC. Mark Dredze is with the Department of Computer Science, Whiting School of Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD. Sandra C. Quinn is with the Department of Family Science and Maryland Center for Health Equity, School of Public Health, University of Maryland, College Park.
  • Kajal S Parikh
    Amelia M. Jamison, Kajal S. Parikh, and Adeena Malik are with the Maryland Center for Health Equity, School of Public Health, University of Maryland, College Park. David A. Broniatowski and Michael C. Smith are with the Department of Engineering Management and Systems Engineering, School of Engineering and Applied Science, and Institute for Data, Democracy, and Politics, The George Washington University, Washington, DC. Mark Dredze is with the Department of Computer Science, Whiting School of Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD. Sandra C. Quinn is with the Department of Family Science and Maryland Center for Health Equity, School of Public Health, University of Maryland, College Park.
  • Adeena Malik
    Amelia M. Jamison, Kajal S. Parikh, and Adeena Malik are with the Maryland Center for Health Equity, School of Public Health, University of Maryland, College Park. David A. Broniatowski and Michael C. Smith are with the Department of Engineering Management and Systems Engineering, School of Engineering and Applied Science, and Institute for Data, Democracy, and Politics, The George Washington University, Washington, DC. Mark Dredze is with the Department of Computer Science, Whiting School of Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD. Sandra C. Quinn is with the Department of Family Science and Maryland Center for Health Equity, School of Public Health, University of Maryland, College Park.
  • Mark Dredze
    Department of Computer Science, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, United States of America.
  • Sandra C Quinn
    Amelia M. Jamison, Kajal S. Parikh, and Adeena Malik are with the Maryland Center for Health Equity, School of Public Health, University of Maryland, College Park. David A. Broniatowski and Michael C. Smith are with the Department of Engineering Management and Systems Engineering, School of Engineering and Applied Science, and Institute for Data, Democracy, and Politics, The George Washington University, Washington, DC. Mark Dredze is with the Department of Computer Science, Whiting School of Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD. Sandra C. Quinn is with the Department of Family Science and Maryland Center for Health Equity, School of Public Health, University of Maryland, College Park.

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