Department of Medicine, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Division of Infectious Diseases, Department of Medicine, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Vaccine. 2019 Aug 14;37(35):4867-4871. doi: 10.1016/j.vaccine.2019.06.086. Epub 2019 Jul 9.
Despite vaccination's role in preventing communicable diseases, misinformation threatens uptake. Social media may disseminate such anti-vaccination messages. We characterized trends in pro- and anti-vaccination discourse on Twitter. All tweets between 2010 and 2019 containing vaccine-related hashtags were identified. Pro- and anti-vaccine tweets and users per quarter (3-months) were tabulated; discussion subcommunities were identified with network analysis. 1,637,712 vaccine-related tweets were identified from 154 pro-vaccine and 125 anti-vaccine hashtags, with 86% of users posting exclusively pro-vaccine and 12% posting exclusively anti-vaccine hashtags. Pro-vaccine tweet volumes are larger than anti-vaccine tweets and consistently increase over time. In contrast, anti-vaccine tweet volumes have decreased since 2014, despite an increasing anti-vaccine user-base. Users infrequently responded across pro/anti-vaccine alignment (0.2%). Despite greater volumes of pro-vaccination discourse in recent years, and the anti-vaccination content userbase being smaller, the anti-vaccine community continues to grow in size. This finding coupled with the minimal inter-communication between communities suggests possible ideological isolation.
尽管疫苗接种在预防传染病方面发挥了作用，但错误信息却威胁到了疫苗接种率。社交媒体可能会传播此类反疫苗接种信息。我们对 Twitter 上的支持和反对疫苗接种的言论趋势进行了描述。确定了 2010 年至 2019 年间包含疫苗相关话题标签的所有推文。按季度（3 个月）对支持和反对疫苗接种的推文和用户进行了统计；通过网络分析确定了讨论的亚社区。从 154 个支持疫苗接种和 125 个反对疫苗接种的话题标签中确定了 1637712 条与疫苗相关的推文，其中 86%的用户只发布支持疫苗接种的话题标签，12%的用户只发布反对疫苗接种的话题标签。支持疫苗接种的推文数量多于反对疫苗接种的推文，并且随着时间的推移持续增加。相比之下，尽管反疫苗接种用户基数不断增加，但自 2014 年以来，反疫苗接种的推文数量却有所减少。用户在支持和反对疫苗接种的态度上很少回应（0.2%）。尽管近年来支持疫苗接种的言论越来越多，而且反疫苗接种内容的用户基数较小，但反疫苗接种群体的规模仍在继续扩大。这一发现加上社区之间很少进行交流，表明可能存在意识形态孤立。
