Perspectives on Acne: What Twitter Can Teach Health Care Providers

Abstract

A cne is one of the most common skin diseases, with an estimated prevalence of 50 million people in the United States alone, and has a significant impact on quality of life. The high prevalence and seriousness of acne makes crafting innovative avenues for patient education about this disease very important. Twitter has become a popular social networking phenomenon with a user base of over 140 million active users and 340 million tweets per day. 1 Its popularity makes it a potentially powerful source of information and route of communication for acne, especially since the Internet can be an adolescent's primary sources of health information. 2 Methods. Twitter is an online social networking service that allows users to post 140-character messages called "tweets" and to subsequently repost or "retweet" these messages from their own account. Using a form of realtime data capture through the use of the Twitter Streaming Application Programming Interface (API), we obtained an institutional review board-exempt status and collected all tweets that contained 1 or more of 5 keywords: pimple, pimples, zit, zits, and acne for a 2-week period from June 10 through June 23, 2012, with additional data monitoring in order to calculate a 1-week retweet count for each tweet. We applied an English filter that we determined had a 93% sensitivity and 97% specificity. 3 These data were then exported as a commaseparated values (CSV) file via the TwitterToCSV software library that one of us (A.C.) developed for this research and that we have made available as an opensource package. 4 High-impact tweets, defined as tweets with one or more retweets, were the only tweets examined in this study. These high-impact tweets were frequency weighted by retweet count and categorized by content into 4 main categories: personal, celebrity, education, and irrelevant/excluded. The education category was further subdivided into: disease question, disease information, treatment question, treatment information (branded), treatment information (non-branded), and treatment information (ambiguous). The language and content of these highimpact tweets were then compared to the acne patient information website published by the American Academy of Dermatology (AAD). 5

The Source and Credibility of Colorectal Cancer Information on Twitter

“…27 In academia, many have paid heed to social discussions of different medical conditions or diseases on a major SNS platform, Twitter. 6,7,10,17,28–34 …”

Beliefs, perceptions, and treatment modalities of acne among schoolchildren in Lithuania: A cross‐sectional study

“…1,2 Prevalences of adolescent acne vary from 44 to 95%. [5][6][7][8] Television, parents, friends, and magazines are highlighted as the most common sources of information about acne. [5][6][7][8] Television, parents, friends, and magazines are highlighted as the most common sources of information about acne.…”

“…3,9 The majority of study participants think that the information they have about acne is insufficient or incorrect. 6,8,11,12 Furthermore, most of them delay in seeking adequate medical help or do not seek it at all. 6,8,11,12 Furthermore, most of them delay in seeking adequate medical help or do not seek it at all.…”

Communication About Childhood Obesity on Twitter

“…23,30,36 Examining social media can provide unique insight into the health information reaching, and possibly influencing, large segments of the general population. 37,38 To better understand Twitter use for communication among the public and public health professionals about childhood obesity, we collected and examined tweets incorporating the hashtag #childhoodobesity and the Twitter users who sent them. We organized our study around inputs from McGuire's communication/persuasion matrix known to influence communication effectiveness—source, message, channel, receiver, and destination.…”