Cancer Control & Population Sciences, Huntsman Cancer Institute, Salt Lake City, UT, USA; Department of Communication, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA.
Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication, Iowa State University, Ames, IA, USA.
Prev Med. 2023 Dec;177:107728. doi: 10.1016/j.ypmed.2023.107728. Epub 2023 Oct 14.
Alcohol use is a major risk factor for several forms of cancer, though many people have limited knowledge of this link. Public health communicators and cancer advocates desire to increase awareness of this link with the long-term goal of reducing cancer burden. The current study is the first to examine the prevalence and content of information about alcohol use as a cancer risk on social media internationally.
We used a three-phase process (hashtag search, dictionary-based auto-identification of content, and human coding of content) to identify and evaluate information from Twitter posts between January 2019 and December 2021.
Our hashtag search retrieved a large set of cancer-related tweets (N = 1,122,397). The automatic search process using an alcohol dictionary identified a small number of messages about cancer that also mentioned alcohol (n = 9061, 0.8%), a number that got small after adjusting for human coded estimates of the dictionary precision (n = 5927, 0.5%). When cancer-related messages also mentioned alcohol, 82% (n = 1003 of 1225 examined through human coding) indicated alcohol use as a risk factor. Coding found rare instances of problematic information (e.g., promotion of alcohol, misinformation) in messages about alcohol use and cancer.
Few social media messages about cancer types that can be linked to alcohol mention alcohol as a cancer risk factor. If public health communicators and cancer advocates want to increase knowledge and understanding of alcohol use as a cancer risk factor, efforts will need to be made on social media and through other communication platforms to increase exposure to this information over time.
饮酒是多种癌症的主要风险因素，尽管许多人对此关联的了解有限。公共卫生传播者和癌症倡导者希望提高人们对这一关联的认识，长期目标是降低癌症负担。本研究首次在国际范围内检查了社交媒体上关于饮酒与癌症风险之间联系的信息的流行程度和内容。
我们使用了一个三阶段的过程（标签搜索、基于字典的内容自动识别和内容人工编码）来识别和评估 2019 年 1 月至 2021 年 12 月期间来自 Twitter 帖子的信息。
我们的标签搜索检索到了大量与癌症相关的推文（N=1122397）。使用酒精字典的自动搜索过程仅识别出少量提到酒精的与癌症相关的消息（n=9061，0.8%），经过对字典精度的人工编码估计进行调整后，这一数字变小（n=5927，0.5%）。当与癌症相关的消息也提到酒精时，82%（通过人工编码检查的 1225 条消息中的 1003 条，n=1003）表明饮酒是一个风险因素。编码发现，关于饮酒与癌症的消息中很少有问题信息（例如，饮酒促进、错误信息）。
很少有提到酒精作为癌症风险因素的与癌症类型相关的社交媒体消息。如果公共卫生传播者和癌症倡导者希望提高对饮酒作为癌症风险因素的认识和理解，就需要在社交媒体和其他传播平台上付出努力，随着时间的推移增加对这些信息的接触。
