The ‘who’ and ‘what’ of #diabetes on Twitter

Abstract

Social media are being increasingly used for health promotion, yet the landscape of users, messages and interactions in such fora is poorly understood. Studies of social media and diabetes have focused mostly on patients, or public agencies addressing it, but have not looked broadly at all of the participants or the diversity of content they contribute. We study Twitter conversations about diabetes through the systematic analysis of 2.5 million tweets collected over 8 months and the interactions between their authors. We address three questions. (1) What themes arise in these tweets? (2) Who are the most influential users? (3) Which type of users contribute to which themes? We answer these questions using a mixed-methods approach, integrating techniques from anthropology, network science and information retrieval such as thematic coding, temporal network analysis and community and topic detection. Diabetes-related tweets fall within broad thematic groups: health information, news, social interaction and commercial. At the same time, humorous messages and references to popular culture appear consistently, more than any other type of tweet. We classify authors according to their temporal ‘hub’ and ‘authority’ scores. Whereas the hub landscape is diffuse and fluid over time, top authorities are highly persistent across time and comprise bloggers, advocacy groups and NGOs related to diabetes, as well as for-profit entities without specific diabetes expertise. Top authorities fall into seven interest communities as derived from their Twitter follower network. Our findings have implications for public health professionals and policy makers who seek to use social media as an engagement tool and to inform policy design.

Selfies of Twitter Data Stream through the Lens of Information Theory: A Comparative Case Study of Tweet-trails with Healthcare Hashtags

“…Considered as an innovation, the hashtag convention was suggested by a Twitter user and initiated on Twitter to allow users to easily sift through and diffuse information that attracts their interest [7]. In 2017, Beguerisse-Díaz et al captured and analyzed 2.5 million tweets with hashtag #diabetes, from late March 2013 to late January 2014 and identified four themes that emerged from the tweets as health information, news, social interaction, and commercial messages [3].…”

Who Tweets About Diabetic Foot on Twitter and Which Tweets Are More Attractive?

“…Beguerisse-Díaz et al 13 investigated which themes arose in tweets about diabetes and who the most influential users were. The thematic groups were health information, news, commercial, social interaction, and recurrent contents.…”

A Biased Review of Biases in Twitter Studies on Political Collective Action

“…This tendency has surely been exacerbated by the relatively narrow range of disciplines contributing to the field: despite its name, the field has drawn from computer scientists, mathematicians, and physicists far more than social scientists. Perhaps interdisciplinary collaboration may present a solution as the field continues to develop; see BeguerisseDíaz et al [41] for a recent example. The tendency to disregard social theory also likely has its origins in the structure of technical journals.…”