Ever wonder how to measure and localize the anti-vaxxers? Here’s the map for you:
Courtesy Professor Chris Vargo of the University of Colorado-Boulder. The above is just a snapshot; follow the link for a real-time interactive map of Tweets with anti-vaccination content, expressed as a percentage of total Tweets. He used this to write up a paper on ScienceDirect. From the Highlights section:
- 272,546 tweets contained anti-vaccine beliefs from 2009 to 2015.
- Anti-vaccine tweets in five states were higher than the national average.
- Anti-vaccine tweet volume increased with news coverage of vaccine-related events.
- Anti-vaccine tweets clustered geographically based on census characteristics.
- Monitoring social media is beneficial to curtail anti-vaccine beliefs.
An article from CU Boulder Today on the subject has some interesting information:
In Colorado, Fort Collins ranked particularly high for the prevalence of anti-vaccine tweets. Regions around the country with high affluence and/or a large number of new moms were most likely to be hotbeds of anti-vaccine Twitter users, the study found.
“The debate online is far from over. There is still a very vocal group of people out there who are opposed to vaccines,” said study co-author Chris Vargo, an assistant professor in the College of Media, Communication and Information. “Half of the talk online that we observed about vaccines was negative.” …
Between 2010 and 2015, the study found anti-vaccine tweets became, overall, more common nationwide. As the number of households that made over $200,000 annually increased or the number of women who had delivered a baby in the past 12 months increased, so did the amount of anti-vaccine tweets.
Within states, sentiment varied widely from city to city.
For instance, in Denver, 24 percent of tweets over the course of five years were anti-vaccine while in Fort Collins, 59 percent were.
As affluence increases, so does the likelihood that you think you know better than the experts. So does money make you smarter, like Trump seems to think?
I suppose the long time persistence of anti-vaccination tweets may indicate centers of the people having those beliefs, but I’m not sure how well Twitter works as a proxy for monitoring such beliefs – perhaps it’s just one person with a bit of an obsession for some areas.
