Pandemics in the Age of Twitter: Content Analysis of “Tweets” During the H1N1 Outbreak

I am a twitter user and have been since before it was cool (my regular Twitter ID is AboutLittleRock but I use PharmistBlog for just this blog. I  still haven’t gotten into TweetDeck enough to separate my main feed into it’s different parts).  I tweet fairly often. I should really use my PharmacistBlog url to tweet the sciency stuff.  Maybe I’ll be better about that in the future (probably not).

Anyway, during the H1N1 outbreak all you heard was how Twitter was causing the overreaction.  If it wasn’t for people spreading fear and misinformation on Twitter, the media wouldn’t have been so bad, etc.  But the truth is, during all of that talk about how Twitter was spreading fear, the people I follow  (and myself) were spreading the “calm down” signal.  Here are the only two examples I found in my feed, but there were many, many more like these (from April 2009):

I think the swine flu epidemic is really an epidemic of fear and bored media. MDs I know are exhausted by the demands for tests.

RT @pvponline the swine flu’s 150 deaths sound scary until you realize the REGULAR flu kills 36,000 annually. #swineflu

So, I never really understood why the media was blaming Twitter. Most of the people in healthcare that I follow were being rather level headed.

Today I read an abstract of a study that really looked into this.   They archived over 300,000 tweets containing the keywords or hashtags “swine flu”, “swineflu”, or “H1N1”.   A random selection of tweets from each hour of each day were coded for content by two raters.  The raters found the same thing that I intuitively felt.  Twitter was actually not the cause of a mass hysteria.  They found that Twitter was actually being used to distribute correct information.

Contrary to some media reports of Twitter fueling an epidemic of misinformation, Twitter can and is already used to quickly disseminate pandemic information to the public.

It’s hard to explain Twitter to those who don’t use it.  I get the “you twitter?” confused look from colleagues a lot, even non-health, web colleagues who should know that social media can be powerful.  However, Twitter is powerful and I think health care providers are one group that can really benefit from its use.

How I use Twitter:

• To find out what people are reading (people post interesting journal articles about their fields to Twitter all the time)
• To find out what people think (like during H1N1 outbreaks, do people really find it’s a big deal?  What are they seeing at their practice areas)
• To network (you meet people in your field from all over the world)
• To ask questions (you can ask what colleagues think)
• To hang out (twitter is just fun)

Physicians have a strong Twitter presence and several articles have been written about best ways for them to use Twitter. Pharmacist can use Twitter for similar reasons.

If you’ve never used Twitter, it’s far more than just a Facebook “status feed” on acid.  The box may ask “What are you doing?” but most people do not use Twitter to simply answer that question.