JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

The currently ongoing global monkeypox outbreak is disproportionately affecting the gay/bisexual “men having sex with men” (gbMSM) community.

Objective:

the aim of this study is to use the posts on Twitter to study country-level variations in topics and sentiments toward monkeypox-2SLGBTQIAP+ related topics. Previous infectious outbreaks have shown that stigma intensifies an outbreak. This work helps health officials control fear and stop discrimination.

Methods:

A number of 24,401 tweets related to Monkeypox and the 2SLGBTQIAP+ community were extracted from May 1 to June 14, 2022. Using ArcGis online the hotspots of the geotagged tweets were identified. Main topics of the tweets were discovered using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) of scikit-learn package. Sentiment analysis was applied to outline the sentiment polarity of tweets for different topics and in different countries. Mann Whitney U test was used to compare the sentiment polarity of different topics and countries.

Results:

The hotspots of the tweets related to Monkeypox and the 2SLGBTQIAP+ community were identified to be the USA, the UK, Canada, Spain, Portugal, India, and Italy. Eight of the ten topics were aimed at stigmatizing the LGBTQ+ community. Five of the topics had a significantly lower sentiment polarity compared to other topics. Canada and the USA had more tweets with negative polarity and lower sentiment score.

Conclusions:

the results show that the 2SLGBTQIAP+ community is being widely stigmatized for spreading the monkeypox virus on social media. This turns the community into a highly vulnerable population, widens the disparities, increases discrimination, and accelerates the spread of the virus. By identifying the hotspots and key-topics of the related tweets, this work helps decision-makers and health officials inform more targeted policies.