Centre for Health Policy, Imperial College London, 10th Floor QEQM, St Mary's Hospital, London W2 1NY, United Kingdom.
Health Policy. 2013 May;110(2-3):291-7. doi: 10.1016/j.healthpol.2013.02.005. Epub 2013 Mar 13.
Social media (for example Facebook and YouTube) uses online and mobile technologies to allow individuals to participate in, comment on and create user-generated content. Twitter is a widely used social media platform that lets users post short publicly available text-based messages called tweets that other users can respond to. Alongside traditional media outlets, Twitter has been a focus for discussions about the controversial and radical reforms to the National Health Service (NHS) in England that were recently passed into law by the current coalition Government. Looking at over 120,000 tweets made about the health reforms, we have investigated whether any insights can be obtained about the role of Twitter in informing, debating and influencing opinion in a specific area of health policy. In particular we have looked at how the sentiment of tweets changed with the passage of the Health and Social Care Bill through Parliament, and how this compared to conventional opinion polls taken over the same time period. We examine which users appeared to have the most influence in the 'Twittersphere' and suggest how a widely used metric of academic impact - the H-index - could be applied to measure context-dependent influence on Twitter.
社交媒体（例如 Facebook 和 YouTube）利用在线和移动技术，允许个人参与、评论和创建用户生成的内容。Twitter 是一个广泛使用的社交媒体平台，用户可以发布短的、公开的基于文本的消息，称为推文，其他用户可以对此进行回复。除了传统媒体，Twitter 也成为了关于英格兰国民保健制度（NHS）有争议和激进改革的讨论焦点，这些改革最近被现任联合政府立法通过。通过分析超过 12 万条关于医疗改革的推文，我们调查了在特定的医疗政策领域，Twitter 是否可以在信息传播、辩论和影响舆论方面提供任何见解。特别是，我们研究了随着议会通过《健康与社会关怀法案》，推文的情绪如何变化，以及这与同期进行的传统民意调查相比有何不同。我们研究了哪些用户在“Twitter 社交圈”中似乎最有影响力，并提出了如何将一种广泛使用的学术影响力指标——H 指数——应用于衡量在 Twitter 上与上下文相关的影响力。
