Yiannakoulias Nikolaos, Slavik Catherine E, Chase Monika
School of Geography and Earth Sciences, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.
School of Geography and Earth Sciences, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.
Vaccine. 2019 Apr 3;37(15):2057-2064. doi: 10.1016/j.vaccine.2019.03.001. Epub 2019 Mar 9.
Billions of hours of YouTube content are viewed every day. Much of this content is aimed at entertainment, some of it is educational, and a considerable quantity is meant to influence or reinforce public opinion on a variety of matters, including health. Most of the content on YouTube is not created by professionals, public institutions or the traditional media, and instead is authored by private individual content creators. Given the potential impact of this medium for communicating health information, it is important for researchers and public health practitioners to understand the nature of health information as it is shared on YouTube. The primary objective of this research is to describe expressions of vaccine hesitancy content on YouTube, and specifically, compare the expression of pro- and anti-immunization sentiments. We do this by not only analyzing a systematic sample of influenza and measles immunization videos in terms of viewer analytics, but also by choice of language. We find that pro- and anti-immunization videos are common, but that videos with anti-immunization sentiment tend to be more 'liked'. We also find that a small number of words can be effectively used to identify anti-immunization content, an observation that could be useful for identifying trends in anti-immunization sentiment on social media. Our results suggest that public health experts may need to increase the profile of their content on YouTube, and that there may be some useful strategies for improving the public's disposition towards pro-immunization messaging.
每天有数十亿小时的YouTube内容被观看。这些内容大多旨在娱乐，有些具有教育意义，还有相当一部分意在影响或强化公众对包括健康在内的各种事务的看法。YouTube上的大部分内容并非由专业人士、公共机构或传统媒体创作，而是由个人内容创作者撰写。鉴于这种传播健康信息的媒介具有潜在影响，研究人员和公共卫生从业者了解在YouTube上分享的健康信息的本质非常重要。本研究的主要目的是描述YouTube上疫苗犹豫内容的表现形式，具体而言，比较支持和反对免疫情绪的表达。我们不仅通过分析流感和麻疹免疫视频的系统样本的观众分析数据来做到这一点，还通过语言选择来进行分析。我们发现支持和反对免疫的视频都很常见，但带有反对免疫情绪的视频往往更受“点赞”。我们还发现，少量词汇可有效用于识别反对免疫的内容，这一观察结果可能有助于识别社交媒体上反对免疫情绪的趋势。我们的结果表明，公共卫生专家可能需要提高他们在YouTube上内容的关注度，并且可能有一些有用的策略来改善公众对支持免疫信息的态度。
