The 'who' and 'what' of #diabetes on Twitter
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by
Mariano Beguerisse-Díaz, Amy K. McLennan, Guillermo
Garduño-Hernández, Mauricio Barahona, Stanley J. Ulijaszek
2015
Abstract
Social media are being increasingly used for health promotion, yet the
landscape of users, messages and interactions in such fora is poorly
understood. Studies of social media and diabetes have focused mostly on
patients, or public agencies addressing it, but have not looked broadly at all
the participants or the diversity of content they contribute. We study Twitter
conversations about diabetes through the systematic analysis of 2.5 million
tweets collected over 8 months and the interactions between their authors. We
address three questions: (1) what themes arise in these tweets?, (2) who are
the most influential users?, (3) which type of users contribute to which
themes? We answer these questions using a mixed-methods approach, integrating
techniques from anthropology, network science and information retrieval such as
thematic coding, temporal network analysis, and community and topic detection.
Diabetes-related tweets fall within broad thematic groups: health information,
news, social interaction, and commercial. At the same time, humorous messages
and references to popular culture appear consistently, more than any other type
of tweet. We classify authors according to their temporal 'hub' and 'authority'
scores. Whereas the hub landscape is diffuse and fluid over time, top
authorities are highly persistent across time and comprise bloggers, advocacy
groups and NGOs related to diabetes, as well as for-profit entities without
specific diabetes expertise. Top authorities fall into seven interest
communities as derived from their Twitter follower network. Our findings have
implications for public health professionals and policy makers who seek to use
social media as an engagement tool and to inform policy design.
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