JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

The #DataSavesLives Data Saves Lives is a public engagement campaign that highlights the benefits of big data research and aims to establish public trust for this emerging research area.

Objective:

Exploring how the #DataSavesLives is utilised on Twitter. We focused on the period when the campaign has expanded outside the United Kingdom and was relaunched around Europe.

Methods:

Public tweets published between 19th April and 15th July 2021, using the hashtag #DataSavesLives were saved using NCapture for NVivo. All tweets were coded twice. Firstly, each tweet was assigned a positive, neutral or negative attitude towards the campaign. Secondly, inductive thematic analysis was conducted.

Results:

Of 1026 unique tweets available for qualitative analysis, discussion around #DataSavesLives was largely positive (n=716) or neutral (n=276) towards the campaign with limited negative attitudes (n=34). Themes derived from the #DataSavesLives debate included: ethical data sharing; the importance of how to proactively engage the public, harnessing the potential of big data; and sharing ideas. The Twitter discourse remains mostly positive towards the campaign. The hashtag is predominantly used by similarly-minded Twitter users to share information about big data projects and to spread positive messages about big data research when there are public controversies. The hashtag usage is mostly by organisation and people supportive of big data research. Tweet authors recognise that the public should be proactively engaged and involved in big data projects. The campaign remains UK centric. The results indicate that the communication around big data research is driven by the professional community and remains one-way as the public rarely use the hashtag.

Conclusions:

The results demonstrate the potential of social media but draws attention to hashtag usage being generally confined to ‘Twitter bubbles’; groups of similarly-minded Twitter users.