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Abstract
Objectives. To examine the role that bots play in spreading vaccine information on Twitter by measuring exposure and engagement among active users from the United States.
Methods. We sampled 53 188 US Twitter users and examined who they follow and retweet across 21 million vaccine-related tweets (January 12, 2017–December 3, 2019). Our analyses compared bots to human-operated accounts and vaccine-critical tweets to other vaccine-related tweets.
Results. The median number of potential exposures to vaccine-related tweets per user was 757 (interquartile range [IQR] = 168–4435), of which 27 (IQR = 6–169) were vaccine critical, and 0 (IQR = 0–12) originated from bots. We found that 36.7% of users retweeted vaccine-related content, 4.5% retweeted vaccine-critical content, and 2.1% retweeted vaccine content from bots. Compared with other users, the 5.8% for whom vaccine-critical tweets made up most exposures more often retweeted vaccine content (62.9%; odds ratio [OR] = 2.9; 95% confidence interval [CI] = 2.7, 3.1), vaccine-critical content (35.0%; OR = 19.0; 95% CI = 17.3, 20.9), and bots (8.8%; OR = 5.4; 95% CI = 4.7, 6.3).
Conclusions. A small proportion of vaccine-critical information that reaches active US Twitter users comes from bots.
Methods. We sampled 53 188 US Twitter users and examined who they follow and retweet across 21 million vaccine-related tweets (January 12, 2017–December 3, 2019). Our analyses compared bots to human-operated accounts and vaccine-critical tweets to other vaccine-related tweets.
Results. The median number of potential exposures to vaccine-related tweets per user was 757 (interquartile range [IQR] = 168–4435), of which 27 (IQR = 6–169) were vaccine critical, and 0 (IQR = 0–12) originated from bots. We found that 36.7% of users retweeted vaccine-related content, 4.5% retweeted vaccine-critical content, and 2.1% retweeted vaccine content from bots. Compared with other users, the 5.8% for whom vaccine-critical tweets made up most exposures more often retweeted vaccine content (62.9%; odds ratio [OR] = 2.9; 95% confidence interval [CI] = 2.7, 3.1), vaccine-critical content (35.0%; OR = 19.0; 95% CI = 17.3, 20.9), and bots (8.8%; OR = 5.4; 95% CI = 4.7, 6.3).
Conclusions. A small proportion of vaccine-critical information that reaches active US Twitter users comes from bots.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | S319-S325 |
| Number of pages | 7 |
| Journal | American Journal of Public Health |
| Volume | 110 |
| Issue number | S3 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Oct 2020 |
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Monitoring the gap between evidence and vaccination behaviour by sampling the location-specific consumption of health information from news and social media
Dunn, A., Leask, J., Mandl, K., Coiera, E., Dey, A., Johnson, M. & MQRES 3 (International), M. 3.
16/01/17 → …
Project: Research