JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

In November 2018, a Chinese researcher reported that his team had applied CRISPR/Cas9 to delete the gene CCR5 from embryos and claimed that the two newborns would have lifetime immunity from HIV infection, an event referred to as #GeneEditedBabies in social media platforms. While this event stirred a worldwide debate on ethical and legal issues regarding clinical trials with embryonic gene sequences, the focus has mainly been on academics and professionals, but how the public, especially stratified by geographic region and culture, reacted to these issues is not yet well understood.

Objective:

To examine online discussions about the #GeneEditedBabies event, characterize, as well as compare, the public’s stance across social media platforms with different user bases.

Methods:

We used a set of relevant keywords to search for online discussions in four worldwide or regional mainstream social media platforms: Sina Weibo (China), Twitter, Reddit, and YouTube. We applied structural topic modeling to analyze the main topics discussed and their temporal trends. Based on the topics we found, we designed an annotation codebook to label 2000 randomly sampled posts from each platform on 1) whether a supporting/opposing/neutral stance towards this event was expressed and 2) what the major considerations of those discussions were if such a stance was described. We utilized the annotated data to compare stances as well as the language used across the four online platforms.

Results:

We collected over 220,000 posts published by approximately 130,000 users regarding the #GeneEditedBabies event. Our results indicated that users discussed a wide range of topics, some of which had clear temporal trends. Our results further indicated that, although almost all experts opposed this event, many online discussions supported this event. Twitter exhibited the largest percentage of discussions in opposition (85.9%, 701/816), followed by Sina Weibo (84.9%, 968/1,140), Reddit (61.2%, 550/898), and YouTube (52.6%, 567/1,078). The primary opposing reason was rooted in ethical concerns, whereas the primary supporting reason was based on the expectation that such technology could prevent the occurrence of diseases in the future. Posts from these four platforms had different language usage and patterns when they expressed stances on the #GeneEditedBabies event.

Conclusions:

This research provides evidence that the discussions in online platforms can offer insights into the public’s stance on gene editing techniques, which vary across online platforms, and that public discussions often differ from those raised by academics and policymakers.