Is social media shaping actions?
When you’re looking for information to help you decide whether to vaccinate your children, where do you turn?
Historically, most people have gone to a health care provider for information.
But with the advent of social media, more and more people are simply logging on.
Now a group of researchers with Oak Ridge Associated Universities is looking at the impact of social media on vaccination rates — and whether it could be turned into a booster.
It’s a particularly timely project, given recent outbreaks of measles so far this year in New York and Washington, and among members of an Atlanta family. The Washington state and two New York outbreaks started when travelers brought back the disease from Israel and the Ukraine, where measles still is common, public health officials said, but spread because U.S. residents had not been vaccinated. Washington — where most of at least 40 measles cases are in children younger than 10 — has a particularly low vaccination rate, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes.
Last year, the U.S. saw 15 outbreaks of measles and 2,002 reported cases, most of which occurred in unvaccinated people, the CDC said.
“There has always been resistance” to vaccines, dating back to the smallpox vaccine in 1796, said ORAU researcher Jennifer Reynolds. “But as public health practitioners, our message has always been the same: Vaccines are safe, vaccines protect you, and they protect those who can’t be vaccinated.”
Scientists say the evidence to back up that statement is abundantly clear, Reynolds added. Yet “myths and misunderstandings” circulate, to the point that the World Health Organization named “vaccine hesitancy” — a reluctance to get vaccinated even when vaccine is readily available — one of 10 threats to global public
health in 2019.
Vaccine hesitancy is prevalent enough that, to address it, researchers have to acknowledge “the landscape,” including a climate of pitting politics against science, before they can understand the perspective of those who refuse the shots, Reynolds said.
And social media, they think, is a good place to start getting it.
Reynolds and her fellow researchers Alan Janssen, Kristin Mattson, Karen Carera and Kelli Bursey just began working with analysts at the Social Media Engagement and Evaluation Suite at the University of Georgia to look at public posts on vaccines across a variety of platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, YouTube.
Using a “social listening tool,” they’ve so far “mined” roughly 4 million posts dealing with childhood immunization, flu shots and the newer HPV vaccine, recommended for preteens through adults.
All the posts are publicly available; the researchers can’t see private posts, messages or emails.
“There’s a spectrum of thought around vaccines,” Mattson said. “We’re really trying to dig into those conversations and understand the nuances.”
For example, the group found during an earlier survey of 600 vaccine-hesitant mothers of young children that many, in spite of misgivings, vaccinate their children.
But nearly all — 98 percent — were active social media users who named social media as one of the top places they look for information on news, health and parenting.
That’s something studies published in recent years have already confirmed, to the point CDC and American Cancer Society experts meeting in 2016 discussed addressing social media rumors and intervening in social media misinformation as a “major gap” in delivering information on the HPV vaccine. That’s partly ease of access. “Before social media, if you wanted information about health, you had to go out and seek it,” Mattson said. “Now, all you have to do is log on … and that information is right in front of you.”
And it’s partly the ease of self-limiting information to read posts only from others who share one’s views.
“It’s very easy to stay with one type of information,” Reynolds said.
But social media has also made it easier for groups that don’t vaccinate to find one another for support and activism.
“As you look at the United States, we’ve always had pockets of folks who were vaccineresistant,” Janssen said. “Social media has allowed folks in those various pockets around the country … to communicate and help support” their ideas.
One of those is the idea of side effects of vaccines, logged by self-reporting to the federal Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System. Another is the idea of a link to autism, bolstered by a sincedisproven study published in 1998; more than 25 peer-reviewed studies have refuted it.
Most of the researchers in the group have young children, so they can empathize with those fears even as they rely on science to soothe them. The group hopes to complete the study, still in its early stages, by summer, offering public health agencies specific tips for social media communication, as ORAU has done in other instances.
“Once we understand who they are, where they are, and what their potential concerns are,” Mattson said, “we can better craft our message to provide them with tailored vaccine information.”