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Background: The exponential increase in health-related online platforms has made the Internet one of the main sources of health information globally. The quality of health contents disseminated on the Internet has been a central focus for many researchers. To date, however, few comparative content analyses of pro- and anti-vaccination websites have...
Citations
... Furthermore, members of anti-vaccination communities rarely use scientific sources to support their claims (Kata, 2012;Yiannakoulias et al., 2019), and a significant portion of online health-related information is often found to lack veracity and quality (Benoit & Mauldin, 2021;Zhao & Zhang, 2017). Generally, webpages promoting anti-vaccination views typically score lower on quality indicators compared to those advocating vaccination (Sak et al., 2015). Moreover, anti-vaccination comments on social media frequently feature conspiracy theories and misinformation, indicating a lack of trust in scientific sources (Klimiuk et al., 2021). ...
... Furthermore, members of anti-vaccination communities rarely use scientific sources to support their claims (Kata, 2012;Yiannakoulias et al., 2019), and a significant portion of online health-related information is often found to lack veracity and quality (Benoit & Mauldin, 2021;Zhao & Zhang, 2017). Generally, webpages promoting anti-vaccination views typically score lower on quality indicators compared to those advocating vaccination (Sak et al., 2015). Moreover, anti-vaccination comments on social media frequently feature conspiracy theories and misinformation, indicating a lack of trust in scientific sources (Klimiuk et al., 2021). ...
The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a rise in opposition to vaccination, hindering herd immunity. As social media play a major role in the formation of anti-vaccination communities, it is critical to monitor the discourse on the platforms to effectively counter the negative sentiment and encourage people to vaccinate. This study employs computational content analysis, specifically topic modeling and time series analysis, to monitor the COVID-19 anti-vaccination communities on Facebook in Czechia. The analysis generated 18 topics with politics, governance, and international affairs being the most discussed, and only five dealt with issues directly related to COVID-19. Discussions about information and its credibility were prevalent, and members of these anti-vaccination communities relied heavily on social media content and conspiracy websites as sources of information, while neglecting scientific resources. The study highlights the need for ongoing monitoring of anti-vaccination communities on social media and the development of effective communication strategies to promote vaccination.
... In this regard, there is evidence that healthcare institutions commonly use digital technologies and the social web for health communication activities on health topics such as (i) the prevention of support measures on important health topics such as: nutritional education in diabetic patients (59), sexual health and awareness of screening for sexually transmitted diseases in selected population cohorts (prisoners) (60), and medical-scientific communication on vaccinations to make users aware of adherence to vaccination programmes (66). In addition, analyses of websites through an infodemiological approach (61), implementation of evaluation tools of vaccinationrelated websites (64) and analyses of patient satisfaction with the Public Health information on found institutional websites (62,63,65) were described. ...
Background and aim:
Websites, social media networks and mobile applications constitute important communication tools, while simultaneously enabling the population to increase their knowledge of health issues. This study aims to describe digital health experiences in Public Health to examine the different possible uses of digital technologies by Public Health Operators (PHOs) and Health Care Workers (HCWs) and the role these tools play in the efficiency of the health interventions undertaken.
Methods:
A narrative literature survey was conducted by consulting the PubMed and Scopus databases to find articles relevant to the topic of interest. The selection criteria adopted for manuscript screening involved including the survey studies dealing with the use of digital means such as new media in Public Health, published between 1 January 2012 and 31 May 2021.
Results:
Based on the keywords, 2,019 manuscripts were identified, of which 45 were included. The articles were grouped according to the digital tool (social media network, mobile application and websites) employed by PHOs and/or HCWs in health promotion initiatives. Specifically, this was broken down into: i) the use of social media in public health: 24 articles, ii) the use of mobile applications: 10 articles, iii) the use of websites: 8 articles and iv) the use of the three digital tools combined: 3 articles.
Conclusions:
The results of this study indicate that digital technologies may play a useful role in Public Health to improve communication between health professionals and patients, provide quality care even remotely and facilitate the achievement of health outcomes for the population from a Health Literacy perspective.
... A limitation is that our participants may not be representative of unobservable characteristics, e.g., they may be more confident using the internet than the general public. However, confidence using the internet is unlikely to bias responses in a particular direction, as people can use the internet both to find information in support of and against vaccinations (Sak et al., 2015). It is also uncertain how large an effect needs to be to inform a message that could ultimately change behaviour. ...
Rational/Objective
Mandating vaccinations can harm public trust, and informational interventions can backfire. An alternative approach could align pro-vaccination messages with the automatic moral values and intuitions that vaccine-hesitant people endorse. The current study evaluates the relationships between six automatic moral intuitions and vaccine hesitancy.
Methods
A cross-sectional survey was designed using Qualtrics (2020) software and conducted online from the 6th to the 13th of April 2021. A representative sample of 1201 people living in Great Britain took part, of which 954 (514 female) passed the attention check items. Participants responded to items about their automatic moral intuitions, vaccination behaviours or intentions related to COVID-19 vaccines, and general vaccine hesitancy. A series of regressions (with and without adjustments for age, gender, and ethnicity) was performed assessing the association between endorsement of each automatic intuition and self-reported uptake of COVID-19 vaccines, and between each automatic intuition and general vaccine hesitancy.
Results
People who endorsed the authority foundation and those who more strongly endorsed the liberty foundation tended to be more vaccine hesitant. This pattern generalises across people's self-reported uptake of COVID-19 vaccines and people's hesitancy towards vaccines in general. To a lesser extent people who expressed less need for care and a greater need for sanctity also displayed greater hesitancy towards vaccines in general. The results were consistent across the adjusted and non-adjusted analyses. Age and ethnicity significantly contributed to some models, but gender did not.
Conclusion
Four automatic moral intuitions (authority, liberty, care, and sanctity) were significantly associated with vaccine hesitancy. Foundation-aligned messages could be developed to motivate those people who may otherwise refuse vaccines, e.g., messages that strongly promote liberty or that de-emphasize authority voices. This suggestion moves away from mandates and promotes the inclusion of a more diverse range of voices in pro-vaccination campaigns.
... Other corpora focus on specific themes. In the field of online anti-vaccine movements, a few studies have collected webpages gathered through search engines (Fu et al., 2016;Okuhara et al., 2017;Sak et al., 2015). This approach is convenient, as it allows researchers to obtain data by mimicking how users retrieve information. ...
... At best, selecting documents based on their content would result in both a limited sample size (due to manual coding, see e.g. Fu et al., 2016;Okuhara et al., 2017;Sak et al., 2015) and limited heterogeneity (due to selection criteria based on a specific linguistic/rhetoric style). We therefore chose to categorize document selection starting from the source (i.e., websites). ...
The spread of online conspiracy theories represents a serious threat to society. To understand the content of conspiracies, here we present the language of conspiracy (LOCO) corpus. LOCO is an 88-million-token corpus composed of topic-matched conspiracy ( N = 23,937) and mainstream ( N = 72,806) documents harvested from 150 websites. Mimicking internet user behavior, documents were identified using Google by crossing a set of seed phrases with a set of websites. LOCO is hierarchically structured, meaning that each document is cross-nested within websites ( N = 150) and topics ( N = 600, on three different resolutions). A rich set of linguistic features ( N = 287) and metadata includes upload date, measures of social media engagement, measures of website popularity, size, and traffic, as well as political bias and factual reporting annotations. We explored LOCO’s features from different perspectives showing that documents track important societal events through time (e.g., Princess Diana’s death, Sandy Hook school shooting, coronavirus outbreaks), while patterns of lexical features (e.g., deception, power, dominance) overlap with those extracted from online social media communities dedicated to conspiracy theories. By computing within-subcorpus cosine similarity, we derived a subset of the most representative conspiracy documents ( N = 4,227), which, compared to other conspiracy documents, display prototypical and exaggerated conspiratorial language and are more frequently shared on Facebook. We also show that conspiracy website users navigate to websites via more direct means than mainstream users, suggesting confirmation bias. LOCO and related datasets are freely available at https://osf.io/snpcg/ .
... Although the importance of the internet in searching for vaccine information is still low in Sudan, web users who search for such information are at risk of experiencing low-quality antivaccine websites that possibly propagate myths and conspiracy theories (5,14). ...
Objective: This study aims to explore vaccine information-seeking behavior and its determinants among pregnant women in Khartoum state, Sudan. The findings from this study will be used to inform further development of policies and interventions in Sudan to increase vaccine acceptance and demand.
Methods: A hospital-based cross-sectional study was conducted in two public hospitals, Omdurman maternity and AL-Saudi hospitals in Omdurman, Khartoum state, from February to April 2020.
Results: We interviewed 350 pregnant women in the two hospitals. Our findings showed that one-third of pregnant women (35.7%) searched for information about vaccines. The vast majority searched for this information before pregnancy and during pregnancy (34.4 and 59.2%, respectively). They primarily searched for topics related to vaccine schedules and vaccine side effects (28.8% for each). The main sources of vaccine-related information consumed by pregnant women were healthcare professionals, particularly doctors (40%), and the internet (20.8%). Findings showed that a high level of education was associated with a greater likelihood of searching for additional vaccine information. Moreover, those who perceived their family to have a high income were more likely to search for information. Additionally, pregnant women with low confidence in vaccines were more likely to be involved in searching for additional vaccine information. This highlights the need for high-quality, easily accessible information that addresses their needs.
Conclusion: Our findings showed that confidence in vaccine influences seeking for relevant information. We recommend the development of client-centered communication interventions to help increasing vaccine confidence and consequently vaccine acceptance and demand.
... First, most attention has been given to vaccine hesitancy and the role of cyberspace in propagating anti-vaxxers' ideas (Kata, 2010(Kata, , 2012Sak et al., 2015;Smith & Graham, 2017). Often by relying on digital sociology approaches, researchers have analyzed the characteristics of online conversations and messages (including on Twitter). ...
Despite the consensus in the medical discipline that certain treatments lack scientific evidence and are worthless if not potentially dangerous, the promotion and selling of fake cures advertised as safe and effective has long plagued healthcare systems, praying on vulnerable patients and their loved ones. The Web and social media are now playing a fundamental role in the propagation of non-science-based treatments and fraudulent medical claims, and in the rise of false health and lifestyle experts. This study combines criminological and computer science expertise to explore and critically analyse the Twitter presence of providers of non-science-based anti-cancer treatments and their active supporters in the English-speaking online community to investigate their structural relationships and to analyse the characteristics of the most popular actors. The features of the social network observed indicate that there is not a stable community of promoters and supporters of non-science-based medical treatments in the Twittersphere, suggesting the lack of a defined subculture and the presence of transient collectives rather than identifiable groups. Nonetheless, it is possible to observe dynamic conversational networks clustering around popular actors, tweets and themes, prompting avenues for further research.
... This is a cause for concern, because on social media every statement has the same value, whether it comes from an expert or a person not associated with medical science 18 . Therefore, the process of decisionmaking in regards to childhood vaccination may be increasingly influenced by low-quality information 19,20 . Specific features of online communities (that lead to the creation of thought bubbles/silos) also contribute to the problem: people gathered around the ideas of the anti-vaccine movement exist in an "echo chamber," which prevents substantive criticism from reaching them 21 . ...
Introduction: Vaccinations are referred to as one of the greatest achievements of modern medicine. However, their effectiveness is also constantly denied by certain groups in society. This results in an ongoing dispute that has been gradually moving online in the last few years due to the development of technology. Our study aimed to utilize social media to identify and analyze vaccine-deniers’ arguments against child vaccinations.
Method: All public comments posted to a leading Polish vaccination opponents’ Facebook page posted between 01/05/2019 and 31/07/2019 were collected and analyzed quantitatively in terms of their content according to the modified method developed by Kata (Kata, 2010). Sentiment analysis was also performed.
Results: Out of 18,685 comments analyzed, 4,042 contained content covered by the adopted criteria: conspiracy theories (28.2%), misinformation and unreliable premises (19.9%), content related to the safety and effectiveness of vaccinations (14.0%), noncompliance with civil rights (13.2%), own experience (10.9%), morality, religion, and belief (8.5%), and alternative medicine (5.4%). There were also 1,223 pro-vaccine comments, of which 15.2% were offensive, mocking, or non-substantive. Sentiment analysis showed that comments without any arguments as well as those containing statements about alternative medicine or misinformation were more positive and less angry than comments in other topic categories.
Conclusions: The large amount of content in the conspiracy theory and misinformation categories may indicate that authors of such comments may be characterized by a lack of trust in the scientific achievements of medicine. These findings should be adequately addressed in vaccination campaigns.
... For information quality, the Health on the Net (HON) criteria [16] and DISCERN criteria [17] are frequently used. Furthermore, for vaccine-related pages, the Online Vaccination Information Quality Codebook has also been applied [18]. These measures consist of a checklist that health information professionals and consumers can use to develop and evaluate online medical information. ...
Abstract
Objective
To investigate the applicability of supervised machine learning (SML) to classify health-related webpages as ‘reliable’ or ‘unreliable’ in an automated way.
Methods
We collected the textual content of 468 different Dutch webpages about early childhood vaccination. Webpages were manually coded as ‘reliable’ or ‘unreliable’ based on their alignment with evidence-based vaccination guidelines. Four SML models were trained on part of the data, whereas the remaining data was used for model testing.
Results
All models appeared to be successful in the automated identification of unreliable (F1 scores: 0.54−0.86) and reliable information (F1 scores: 0.82−0.91). Typical words for unreliable information are ‘dr’, ‘immune system’, and ‘vaccine damage’, whereas ‘measles’, ‘child’, and ‘immunization rate’, were frequent in reliable information. Our best performing model was also successful in terms of out-of-sample prediction, tested on a dataset about HPV vaccination.
Conclusion
Automated classification of online content in terms of reliability, using basic classifiers, performs well and is particularly useful to identify reliable information.
Practice implications
The classifiers can be used as a starting point to develop more complex classifiers, but also warning tools which can help people evaluate the content they encounter online.
... As also stressed by MacDonald, poor or inappropriate communications can lower the vaccination coverage and contribute to the hesitation of vaccination [40]. However, the quality of vaccine-related material available online is varied, and internet search engines often bring people to anti-vaccine or low-quality web information; therefore, the potential for misinformation is relevant [41,42]. Generally, who use a search engine is likely to focus on the potential risks of the vaccines and thus find anti-vaccination websites. ...
Background:
Recently, social networks have become a popular source of information on health topics. Particularly, in Italy, there is a lively discussion on the web regarding vaccines also because there is low vaccination coverage, vaccines hesitancy, and anti-vaccine movements. For these reasons, in 2017, Institutions have introduced a law to force children to make ten compulsory vaccines for school attendance and proposed a vaccination campaign. On social networks, this law has fostered a fierce discussion between pro-vaccinations and anti-vaccinations people. This paper aims to understand if and how the population's opinion has changed before the law and after the vaccination campaign using the titles of the videos uploaded on Youtube in these periods.
Method:
Using co-occurrence network (CON) and sentiment analysis, we analysed the topics of YouTube Italian videos on vaccines in 2017 and 2018.
Results:
The CON confirms that vaccinations were very disapproved before the law. Instead, after the communication campaign, people start to be less critical. The sentiment analysis shows that the intense vaccination campaign also promoted by medical doctors pushed the sentiment to change polarity from a prevailing negative opinion in 2017 (52% negative) to a positive one in 2018 (54% positive).
Conclusion:
At the population level, the potential misinformation of social networks could be significant and is a real risk for health. Our study highlights that vaccination campaigns on social networks could be an essential instrument of health policies and a sharp weapon to fight ignorance and misrepresentations of non-qualified people influencing individuals' decision-making.
