Tweets about mpox outbreak mainly displayed negative emotions
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Key takeaways:
- An analysis of 850,000 tweets displayed mainly negative emotions regarding mpox.
- Some spread misinformation and conspiracy theories, although many helped spread vital public health information.
An analysis of tweets from the mpox outbreak in 2022 showed that most Twitter users felt fear and anger toward the outbreak, researchers said.
“With the significant disparities seen in the HIV epidemic and COVID-19 pandemic, alongside the increased spread of misinformation and disinformation on social media platforms, we felt that it was important to study how the spread of the monkeypox virus around the globe was perceived on social media,” Lauren N. Cooper, MS, data scientist with University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center’s Clinical Informatics Center, told Healio.
“It was important to us what the public perception of this disease was and how the discourse around prevention, treatment, and risk was conducted,” Cooper said.
To help understand the public perception of mpox, Cooper and colleagues analyzed English language tweets using the keyword “monkeypox” from May 1, 2022, through July 23, 2022. According to the study, they collected data on the Twitter users themselves, including gender, ethnicity and race, and analyzed the tweets for reaction and emotions. They also compared cohorts of users who self-identify as LGBTQ+ allies vs. those who do not, and cohorts identified as “bots” vs. human users.
Overall, the search yielded 858,581 tweets written by 384,925 unique users, with tweets including media such as videos, photos or URLs comprising 13%, 12% and 33.4% of tweets respectively. Interactions with these tweets showed that nearly half had at least one like (49.3%), 28.6% had at least one reply, and 21% were retweeted at least once.
The overall sentiment of all tweets included in the analysis were perceived as “negative” with a mean sentiment score of –0.413 on a –4 to +4 scale, whereas neutral tweets — those with scores of 0 — comprised 46.5% of all tweets, and those classified as positive comprised 14.5%.
An emotion analysis of the tweets showed mainly negative emotion corresponding with the negative sentiment toward mpox. Of the five emotions analyzed — happy, surprise, anger, fear and sadness — 67.8% of tweets were considered to have negative emotions, with fear being present most often (38.6%). Of the remaining tweets, only 15.1% were labeled as expressing happiness and 16.9% surprise.
Additionally, 48,330 of the analyzed tweets were written by LGBTQ+ self-identified advocates or allies, with the most common emotions expressed being fear and sadness. Cooper said by identifying LGBTQ+ allies, the researchers were able to assess the viewpoints “of a community that had largely been affected by monkeypox and, in the event of future public health events, could repeat similar analysis to provide better health care opportunities to other affected populations.”
They found that although both groups demonstrated negative emotions toward the outbreak, they did so in different manners.
According to the study, LGBTQ+ allies focused their “negative emotions” on topics such as a lack of preventive vaccines early in the outbreak or stigmas facing the LGBTQ+ communities, whereas non-allies focused anger and fear on the overlap with COVID-19 and how mpox is transmitted.
“With the ability for rapid spread of appropriate information via social media, clinicians, public health officials, and news media outlets can quickly provide the public with important guidance on future widespread disease outbreaks to both combat the illness itself and decrease misinformation about public health issues,” Cooper said. “Utilizing information gathered from Twitter can also allow for targeted interventions like primary prevention through vaccination campaigns.”
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