The HPV vaccine portrayal in Twitter messages
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Abstract
Currently, more and more people are using the Internet, and specifically social networks, to find information on health issues. However, only a few is known about how information about the HPV vaccine is disseminated on social networks. This article presents an analysis and a comparison of the content of the tweets published in English and in Spanish, related to vaccination against HPV and cervical cancer. In total, 1.707 tweets in English and 418 in Spanish were examined. Most messages in English were personal comments posted by users with a negative focus on HPV vaccination. In contrast, most of the tweets published in Spanish were commercial advertisements for the vaccine, messages from health organizations and personal comments from users, and they had a positive stance towards vaccination against HPV. In both languages, a large part of the messages contained a link to direct users to informative health web pages. The results suggest that researchers of the HPV vaccine must take into account this means of communication due to its wide scope and its immediate diffusion capacity.Keywords
HPV, papilloma, vaccine, health, Twitter, communicationDownloads
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