Why were Twitter users obsessed with Vitamin D during the first year of the pandemic?
Mavroeidi, Alexandra and Innes, Ryan and Miyake, Esperanza and Rasmussen Pennington, Diane (2022) Why were Twitter users obsessed with Vitamin D during the first year of the pandemic? Other. medRxiv, Cold Spring Harbor, NY. (https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.04.13.22273830)
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Abstract
The aim of this study was to explore how the relationship between vitamin D and COVID-19 has been represented on the social media site Twitter. NCapture was used to collect textual Tweets on a weekly basis for three months during the pandemic. In total, 21,140 Tweets containing the keywords "vitamin D" and "COVID" were collected and imported to NVivo12. An inductive thematic analysis was carried out on the Tweets collected on the first (12/2/2021) and last week (21/5/2021) of the recording period to identify themes and subthemes. Quality control of the coding was conducted on a sample of the dataset (20%). Data were also compared to the "ground truth" to explore the accuracy of media outputs. The four main themes identified were "association of vitamin D with COVID-19", "politically informed views", "vitamin D deficiency" and "vitamin D sources". When compared to the ground truth, the majority of information relating to the key findings was 'incorrect' for all of the findings. This study contributes to the area of research by highlighting the extent of the issue social media sites face with health-related misinformation. In the context of COVID-19, it is important that sites such as Twitter improve their existing misinformation policies, as misinformation can be detrimental in disease prevention.
ORCID iDs
Mavroeidi, Alexandra ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5213-1596, Innes, Ryan, Miyake, Esperanza ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5504-7648 and Rasmussen Pennington, Diane ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1275-7054;-
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Item type: Monograph(Other) ID code: 82317 Dates: DateEvent18 April 2022Published18 April 2022SubmittedSubjects: Bibliography. Library Science. Information Resources
Medicine > Public aspects of medicine > Public health. Hygiene. Preventive MedicineDepartment: Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (HaSS) > Psychological Sciences and Health > Physical Activity for Health
Faculty of Science > Computer and Information Sciences
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (HaSS) > Humanities > Journalism, Media and CommunicationDepositing user: Pure Administrator Date deposited: 12 Sep 2022 14:34 Last modified: 12 Dec 2024 01:55 URI: https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/id/eprint/82317