Social Media Engagement With Cancer Awareness Campaigns Declined During the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election

Abstract

Cancer awareness campaigns compete with other health and social issues for public attention. We examined whether public engagement with breast cancer and prostate cancer declined in 2016 during the U.S. presidential election compared to 2015 on Twitter and Google Trends. We found that attention to breast cancer and prostate cancer declined in 2016 before the election as compared to 2015 in Twitter posts and Google searches. The findings suggest that cancer information seeking behavior, passive exposure to health communication, and active participation in social media about cancer all decreased during the peak weeks of the 2016 election season. Future health promotion initiatives and information dissemination efforts will benefit from monitoring the major issues garnering social media attention and then adjusting their timing or communication strategies to ensure that public engagement with their key policy messages remains strong when emerging news stories capture public interest.

Examining Emergent Communities and Social Bots Within the Polarized Online Vaccination Debate in Twitter

“…Furthermore, our results might be skewed with respect to the timeframe of the study, which was just after the measles outbreak in California Disneyland and it would therefore be interesting to carry out the analysis over a more longitudinal timeframe and also without assuming each user (including each bot user) to have same opinion. However, work by Vraga et al (2017) on the discussion of cancer in social media showed peaks of traffic during awareness months and little in other time frames, which could be broadly considered similar to the disease outbreak studied here. In addition, as Bello-Orgaz et al (2017) found that influential users (i.e., those with high degree centrality) are often in pro-vaccine communities and Love, Himelboim, Holton, & Stewart (2013) discovered that no particular subject is dominating the vaccine conversation in Twitter, it would, therefore, be interesting for future research to explore whether "influential" users are more of those with high degree centrality or those who they agree, and thus understand what defines a user to be influential in the context of anti-vaccination or other highly divided online discussions (Cha, Haddadi, Benevenuto, & Gummadi, 2010).…”

Strategies for Effective Health Communication during the Coronavirus Pandemic and Future Emerging Infectious Disease Events

“…Social media analytics may also reveal which health issues and which at‐risk populations are not participating in online conversations and are therefore missing out on opportunities for health education. For example, data analyses might show gender gaps in which health issues receive online attention (Vraga et al, 2018) or identify when media engagement about a health issue is being displaced by political campaigns (Vraga et al, 2017). Understanding what information about a public health issue is missing on social media enables organizations to update their communication strategies.…”

Applying the DEMATEL Method to Evaluate Social Media Criteria in Promoting Sustainable Health Behavior—A Case Study of Vegetarian Diet Promotion by a Non-Profit Organization

“…Although social media is a powerful tool for health communication, some empirical evidence has demonstrated that in some cases, social media health communication fails to motivate the target audience's engagement in the health issue at hand [3,4]. This is due to several factors, such as users' skepticism about the accuracy of the information, cultural factors, privacy concerns, and users' preoccupation with other issues [5][6][7][8]. Consequently, the healthcare organization misses out on the chance to bring positive social change in the societies it serves.…”