Journal article

Vaccine opponents' use of Twitter during the 2016 US presidential election: Implications for practice and policy

The recent inauguration of President Trump carries with it many public health policy implications. During the election, President Trump, like all political candidates, made policy commitments to various interest groups including vaccine skeptics. These groups celebrated the announcement that Robert Kennedy Jr., a noted proponent of a causal link between vaccines and autism, may chair a commission on vaccines. Furthermore, during the GOP primaries, Mr. Trump endorsed messages associated with vaccine refusal on Twitter, and met with prominent vaccine refusal advocates including Andrew Wakefield, who published the retracted and discredited 1998 Lancet article claiming to link autism to MMR vaccination. In this paper, we show that the new administration has mobilized vaccine refusal advocates, potentially enabling them to influence the national agenda in a manner that could lead to changes in existing vaccination policy. Vaccination policy has proven critical to nearly eliminating many deadly infectious diseases in the United States, and the majority (83%) of Americans believe that the benefits of vaccines outweigh the risks. However, several small yet vocal groups of vaccine refusal advocates claim that vaccines are not safe. Much of the communication that mobilizes these groups and increases vaccine hesitancy is carried out over social media. Elsewhere, we argued that Twitter is especially valuable for gaining rapid insight into rationales for vaccine refusal and how these differ across socio-demographic characteristics. In this paper, we examine how different candidates during the 2016 presidential campaign commanded the attention of Twitter users who communicated about vaccination on Twitter – an indicator of their ability to shape the political agenda. Specifically, we analyzed a comprehensive set of 538 million tweets collected from the Twitter API between December 1, 2014 and December 1, 2016 that mentioned one of several vaccination keywords (e.g. vaccine, immunization).

Languages

  • English

Publication year

2017

Journal

Vaccine

Volume

36

Type

Journal article

Categories

  • Service delivery

Countries

  • United States

Tags

  • Communications
  • Policy and legislation
  • Social media
  • Vaccine hesitancy

WHO Regions

  • Region of the Americas

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Added on: 2017-08-22 03:27:25

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