Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: May 3, 2021
Date Accepted: Aug 12, 2021
Date Submitted to PubMed: Sep 27, 2021
What Articles On Measles Europeans Share On Social Media: Text Analysis Study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Despite the existence of an effective vaccine, measles is still a disease threatening the health and lives of many Europeans. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the uptake of measles vaccine declined, so after the pandemic European societies will probably notice an increase in measles morbidity. As social media are one of the main causes of vaccine hesitancy, a knowledge of the kind of information about measles their users share can probably help in creating educational campaigns.
Objective:
We wanted to define the characteristics of European measles news shared on social media during the years 2017–2019.
Methods:
We downloaded and translated into English 10 305 articles about measles published in the European Union countries. We found their main topics using Latent Dirichlet Allocation method and estimated their sentiment. Finally, we used linear regression to find the factors explaining the number of shares of an article on social media.
Results:
European media mostly describe measles in the context of local European events. Topics presenting educational information and describing world outbreaks appear less frequently. The most common emotions in our news dataset are fear and trust. Readers are more likely to share information containing educational topics and describing the situation in Germany, Ukraine, Italy, and Samoa. A higher proportion of anger, joy and sadness in the text was also associated with a higher number of shares.
Conclusions:
We identified the features of articles, which are connected with an increased number of shares on social media. Social media users prefer to share the educational news rather than the informational ones. The right emotional message can also increase the willingness of social media users to share an article. Public health professionals should create content about measles that contains educational or scientific information, and positive emotions. Articles created according to these principles offer the best chance of reaching thousands of readers on social media.
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.