Understanding Immunisation Awareness and Sentiment with Social Media - Project Overview

www.unglobalpulse.org • info@unglobalpulse.org • 2015 1
UNDERSTANDING IMMUNISATION AWARENESS AND SENTIMENT
THROUGH ANALYSIS OF SOCIAL MEDIA AND NEWS CONTENT
PROGRAMME AREA: PUBLIC HEALTH
BACKGROUND
Health workers face many challenges when it comes to child
immunisation. Vaccinating children is often challenging work,
requiring knowledge of caregivers, travel to hard to reach areas
and communication with caregivers, parents and children.
Additionally, a lack of information or the spread of misinformation
poses a challenge for health workers.
The dissemination of internet-mediated, misleading information
about immunisation has proven devastating for control efforts in
recent years. Globally, challenges for immunisation programs "have
ranged from isolated episodes of non-acceptance (due to religious,
ethical or medical considerations) to active political mobilisation
against immunisation programs"1
. As immunisation uptake is
mediated by socio-cultural and political influences, locally
appropriate communication responses are required to meet and
sustain coverage goals.
MINING SOCIAL & MAINSTREAM MEDIA FOR
IMMUNISATION CONVERSATIONS
Public, English language content relating to vaccination from two
social media platforms (Twitter and Facebook) was analysed along
with mainstream media. The time period was January-December
2014 and the geographies were India, Pakistan, Nigeria and
Kenya. Relevant content was first extracted by filtering for one of a
comprehensive set of terms (a taxonomy) directly related to
immunisation such as
 “vaccine” OR “antivaccine” OR "anti-immunisation" OR "anti-
vax"
Additional taxonomies were used to categorise each message into
the following categories: “Religion/Ideals”, “Distrust/Refusal”,
“News/Events”, “Side-effects”, “Safety”, and other topics.
Spikes in content were strongly driven by specific events such as
attacks on polio workers and polio campaigns in Pakistan.
1
Goldstein S, MacDonald N, Guirguis S and the SAGE Working Group on
Vaccine Hesitancy (2015) Health Communication and Vaccine Hesitancy,
Vaccine (in press)
The figures above show weekly number of vaccine related posts on Twitter
and Facebook in Pakistan.
Comparison of the density of retweet networks between Twitter users.
Nigeria (left) and India (right). Each blue dot is a Twitter user. Users are
connected if one retweets a vaccine related message produced by the
other. The size of the dot signifies the user’s number of followers.
SUMMARY
This multi-country study aims to track and analyse online conversations related to immunisation on social media and mainstream media
in India, Kenya, Nigeria and Pakistan. Findings from the study showed that in social media, Nigerian and Pakistani politicians are active
and influential in the vaccination debate and the political dimension is often referred to when discussing the failure to eradicate diseases
such as polio. However, in Kenya, religious and ideological aspects were more frequently discussed. Twitter activity is primarily driven by
sharing of news stories in all countries whereas Facebook focuses on the 'distrust' and 'ideals' categorisation. Finally it was found that
mainstream media related different actors and entities than social media. The project shows how methods including sentiment analysis,
topic classification and network analysis can be used to support public health workers and communication campaigns.

www.unglobalpulse.org • info@unglobalpulse.org • 2015 2
Using network analysis and demographic classification of users,
key influencers and their audiences were identified. By mapping
out users who retweeted each other, we obtain a ‘birds-eye’ view of
the vaccine debate and compare the nature of the conversation
between countries.
The India influencer network contains more users who are more
active, with a more strongly defined core of users with large
audiences. Such a scenario implies that the narrative is dominated
by a few individuals or organisations; conversely the Nigerian
network is more diffuse with fewer individual users who can be
easily identified as important or dominating the immunisation
conversation.
The news narrative in each country was analysed by clustering
together articles with related content into distinct topic clusters.
This revealed the structure of the news narrative and how key
events and organisations were discussed.
Network of news articles in Kenya (using the news analysis software Quid).
Each dot represents a news story and is sized by degree (number of
connections it shares with others), and is coloured depending on the topic
cluster. Stories with related content are linked. We also looked at the
sentiment for each article and saw that news about Ebola were the most
negative while the Catholic Church vs. Government debate also saw a
number of negatively phrased articles.
Sentiment analysis is a method to automatically analyse a piece of
text and extract a measure of how positive or negative that text is.
The plot above shows the sentiment expressed via Twitter over time.
This was applied to online conversations related to vaccination and
tracked over time. For example, strong negative sentiment to a
tetanus vaccine was driven by the Kenyan catholic church.
Conversely, events such as the official announcement of India’s
polio-free status were met with many messages with positive
sentiments.
INSIGHTS & OUTCOMES
This work demonstrated the ability of social media monitoring to
better understand public opinion about immunisation. Twitter was
primarily used to share news stories while Facebook allowed for
longer discussions touching upon many different sub-topics at
once. The mainstream news in turn often reflected different
narratives to user generated social media content. Key differences
in the debate were observed between and within countries. For
example, in Kenya and Nigeria the vaccine debate centered more
on ideals and politics than in Pakistan and India. Within India, the
conversation activity was sensitive to specific events unique to
certain regions of the country. Beyond the content of the vaccine
discussion, the type of platform (e.g. feature phone, smart phone,
blogging platform) used to share content differed between
countries.
It was found that the majority of social media users were
comfortable with English, using English either to write their user
description or as the language used to display content internally
within the platform. This was true even if they produced content in
their primary non-English language.
IMPLICATIONS & RECOMMENDATIONS
• Campaigning for vaccination efforts should be targeted to a
sub-national level and responsive to local events.
• Twitter and Facebook differed in several ways: Twitter
responded quickly to events and allowed sharing of news.
• Users of Facebook and Twitter seem comfortable with
English, suggesting that campaigns may reasonably be
conducted only in English if resources are limited.
• For listening purposes it could be important to target local
platforms and new audiences to established platforms who
may not share the same knowledge of English. Therefore it is
important that investment is made in software libraries to
analyse non-European languages such as Urdu and Hindi.
REFERENCES
Tracking Anti-Vaccination Sentiment in Eastern European Social Media
Networks (2013) UNICEF
UN Global Pulse, ‘Understanding Public Perceptions of Immunisation
Using Social Media,’ Global Pulse Project Series no.9, 2014
HOW TO CITE THIS DOCUMENT:
UN Global Pulse, “Understanding Immunisation Awareness and
Sentiment Through Social and Mainstream Media”, Global Pulse
Project Series no. 19, 2015.

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Understanding Immunisation Awareness and Sentiment with Social Media - Project Overview