Measles Outbreak and Public Conversation on Twitter

Theoretical Background and research questions/hypothesis:  Since the measles outbreak in California amusement park, concerns proliferated on social media. To understand these concerns, it is necessary to examine the public conversation during the disease outbreak. This study examined the public conversation on Twitter to identify dominant topics and overarching topics in the case of the measles outbreak in 2015.

Methods:  Twitter was selected for data collection due to its popularity as a microblog as well as the active nature of its users in sending messages related to social issues. Using Python and Twitter streaming APIs, a total of 86,515 tweets and retweets including keyword “measles” were collected from February 11 to March 3, 2015. This study used a text mining approach to uncover key patterns within unstructured data to understand what information has been dominantly discussed and shared regarding the measles outbreak. 

Results:  By analyzing tweets and retweets separately through a text topic node, the top 10 tweet and retweet topics were identified respectively. For tweet messages, four major topics included: how to prevent measles outbreak in an individual level, prevention at a societal level, vaccinations, and the urge for health organization and government to step-up this outbreak. For retweet messages, however, vaccinations topics dominated six out ten topics. These vaccination topics include few rules about teacher’s vaccination and concerns, urging messages to parents and CDC to vaccinate children, disease spread prevention from vaccination, and tweet message from CDC about the importance of vaccination. The remaining retweet topics were the measles outbreak in Canada, danger of the measles virus, urging to the UN health agency to step-up surveillance to prevent measles spread, and reference to California’s BART riders potential exposure of measles.

Conclusions:  The measles outbreak triggered active discussions on Twitter. The amplification of vaccination-topic retweets indicate that Twitter users were most concerned with sharing vaccination information, along with calling attention to the need for government or health agencies actions for the measles outbreak. Although the results should be interpreted with some caution due to the limitations of data, it can be concluded that prevention information, vaccination, was the most important topic for people in this contagious disease outbreak.

Implications for research and/or practice:  This descriptive study demonstrated that post-outbreak Twitter conversations focus on sharing information about ways to avoid the contagious disease. Since vaccination messages were most dominantly delivered from following users on social media, social media followers may trust the source of the original tweet and may spread the message to his/her followers like this measles outbreak case. Through the chain of public health message sharing, social media could be one of effective channels to communicate with public. Thus, it might be useful for health organizations and governments to identify opinion leaders on social media and use them to deliver correct prevention information quickly. Future research should also explore the effect of social media on how people perceive vaccination and vaccination rate.