‘Pray’ and ‘hope’: Assessing social media response to Damar Hamlin’s sudden cardiac arrest
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Key takeaways:
- Twitter posts after the collapse of athlete Damar Hamlin frequently included the words “pray” and “hope.”
- There were fewer posts that referenced CPR and the use of automated external defibrillators.
An analysis of social media reactions after the televised collapse of Damar Hamlin suggests many people do not see an active role for themselves after witnessing a sudden cardiac arrest, prompting a call for public awareness campaigns.
On Jan. 2, more than 23.6 million people witnessed the sudden cardiac arrest (SCA) of Hamlin, a U.S. football player aged 24 years, during a live televised game. His collapse was promptly recognized as SCA and CPR was provided; he was later discharged from the hospital. Hamlin’s resuscitation was the second successful SCA resuscitation during a recent major sports event; Christian Eriksen, a Danish soccer player aged 29 years, experienced SCA at the 2020 European Championship.
Image: Adobe Stock
But in an analysis of reactions to the event on social media — in particular, Twitter — researchers found that there is an opportunity to better educate the public about the role they could potentially play after witnessing an SCA.
“Mr. Hamlin’s successful resuscitation serves as an example of high-quality SCA resuscitation care,” Nino Fijačko, MSc, of the faculty of health sciences at the University of Maribor, Žitna, Slovenia, and colleagues wrote in JAMA Network Open. “Pray and hope were the most used sentimental describing state verbs rather than action verbs, suggesting that laypersons are still relatively passive when thinking or hearing about SCA events. In the U.S., 90% of SCA events end in death. Public awareness campaigns during sports events can influence laypersons’ willingness to act when SCA occurs and encourage CPR training.”
Use of hashtags show concern, anticipation
Fijačko and colleagues compiled a database of all posts on Twitter containing prespecified hashtags from Jan. 2 at 8:55 p.m. EST to Jan. 4 at 8:55 a.m. EST, using academictwitteR, a package that allows researchers to collect tweets. Researchers also collected posts from 6 hours before the event as baseline data.
Researchers queried for the following hashtags: #PrayersforDamar, #3, #DamarHamlin, #cardiacarrest, #CPRSavesLives, #Hamlin, #BuffaloBills, #emergencymedicine, #bengals, #Bills, #BillsVsBengals, #BillsNation or #BillsMaf, and they used Syuzhet package to analyze the sentiment in posts. Researchers also used the National Research Council of Canada’s Word-Emotion Association Lexicon to analyze posts in eight category emotions: trust, anticipation, joy, fear, surprise, sadness, anger and disgust.
Researchers included 83,065 posts that were posted within 24 hours of Hamlin’s SCA and evaluated changes in 13,367 posts that were posted during the next 24 hours. Additionally, they used 2,560 posts covering the 6-hour time window before the SCA to visualize the volume of posts aggregated in eight emotion categories.
During the first 24 hours, the most frequently expressed sentiment was anticipation (17.1%). Compared with 48-hour posts, changes in sentiment were most significant in anger, with a relative increase of 1.2% to 10.3%.
With 5,308 posts, “pray” was one of the most posted words in 24 hours. There were 818 posts in 24 hours that included the hashtags #CPR, #AED or #SuddenCardiacArrest, which decreased to 74 the day after Hamlin’s SCA.
“Despite survival hinging on CPR and AED use, few posts highlighted these terms, and use of these terms decreased in the following 24 hours,” the researchers wrote. “This suggests a missed opportunity for public awareness of key resuscitation actions. The low frequency of these terms in public discourse may be related to the low national awareness of CPR and low prevalence of CPR training in the U.S., documented in prior work.”
The researchers noted that the analysis was only conducted for one social media platform; however, the data suggest there is a “large opportunity” to improve basic awareness of CPR and AED use.
“Partnership with sports leagues and celebrity figures who could champion the need for training may accomplish this,” the researchers wrote.
Leverage social media for public health messaging
In a related editorial, Shikha Jain, MD, FACP, associate professor of medicine with tenure in the division of hematology, oncology and cell therapy at the University of Illinois Cancer Center in Chicago, consulting editor for Healio Women in Oncology and host of Healio’s Oncology Overdrive podcast, wrote that an analysis of specific chosen hashtags may not necessarily reflect broader perspectives.
“Fijako and colleagues felt that this was a missed opportunity for public health education during a national event. But it is also possible the analysis of specific hashtags, such as #CPR and #AED, in the immediate aftermath may not show the broader influence of the online dialogue after the initial shock,” wrote Jain, also the director of communication strategies in medicine and associate director of oncology communication and digital innovation. “After the event, there were examples of the collective outcomes associated with Mr. Hamlin’s cardiac event, with a national increase in the dialogue surrounding cardiac arrest and resuscitation, as can be seen by data reported by National Public Radio and the American Heart Association. There was an increase in urgency to get AEDs in schools, and the AHA reported a 620% increase in the pageviews to hands-only CPR pages.”
Jain wrote that events, such as the cardiac event Hamlin experienced on national television, reemphasize the need for effective strategies and education on how to most effectively use social media platforms to disseminate accurate information and the need to find ways to assess the impact of these types of messaging campaigns.
“Although not described by Fijačko et al, there was also misinformation spread surrounding the event, such as the fabricated national news headline claiming the cardiac arrest was due to a vaccine injury,” Jain wrote. “These types of disinformation also influence the perceptions of individuals engaging with social media and traditional media. The blurring of lines of truth and fiction on social media becomes a challenge when trying to engage with the public and provide messaging and ensure the information being disseminated is factual and evidence-based.”
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