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      Celebrity Cancer on Twitter: Mapping a Novel Opportunity for Cancer Prevention

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          Abstract

          Social media platforms have the potential to facilitate the dissemination of cancer prevention and control messages following celebrity cancer diagnoses. However, cancer communicators have yet to systematically leverage these naturally occurring interventions on social media as these events are difficult to identify as they are unfolding and little research has analyzed their effect on social media conversations. In this study, we add to the research by analyzing how a celebrity cancer announcement influenced Twitter conversations in terms of the volume of social media messages and the type of content. Over a 9-day period, during which actor Ben Stiller announced that he had been treated for prostate cancer, we collected 1.2 million Twitter messages about cancer. We conducted automated content analyses to identify how often common cancer sites (prostate, breast, colon, or lung) were discussed. Then, we used manual content analysis on a sample of messages to identify cancer continuum content (awareness, prevention, early detection, diagnosis, treatment, survivorship, and end of life). Chi-square analyses were implemented to evaluate changes in cancer site and cancer continuum content before and after the announcement. We found that messages related to prostate cancer increased significantly more than expected for 2 days following Stiller’s announcement. However, the number of cancer messages that described other cancer locations either did not increase or did not increase by the same magnitude. In terms of message content, results showed larger than expected increases in diagnosis messages. These results suggest opportunities to shape social media conversations following celebrity cancer announcements and increase prevention and early detection messages.

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          Most cited references26

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          Using Twitter for breast cancer prevention: an analysis of breast cancer awareness month

          Background One in eight women will develop breast cancer in her lifetime. The best-known awareness event is breast cancer awareness month (BCAM). BCAM month outreach efforts have been associated with increased media coverage, screening mammography and online information searching. Traditional mass media coverage has been enhanced by social media. However, there is a dearth of literature about how social media is used during awareness-related events. The purpose of this research was to understand how Twitter is being used during BCAM. Methods This was a cross-sectional, descriptive study. We collected breast cancer- related tweets from 26 September - 12 November 2012, using Twitter’s application programming interface. We classified Twitter users into organizations, individuals, and celebrities; each tweet was classified as an original or a retweet, and inclusion of a mention, meaning a reference to another Twitter user with @username. Statistical methods included ANOVA and chi square. For content analysis, we used computational linguistics techniques, specifically the MALLET implementation of the unsupervised topic modeling algorithm Latent Dirichlet Allocation. Results There were 1,351,823 tweets by 797,827 unique users. Tweets spiked dramatically the first few days then tapered off. There was an average of 1.69 tweets per user. The majority of users were individuals. Nearly all of the tweets were original. Organizations and celebrities posted more often than individuals. On average celebrities made far more impressions; they were also retweeted more often and their tweets were more likely to include mentions. Individuals were more likely to direct a tweet to a specific person. Organizations and celebrities emphasized fundraisers, early detection, and diagnoses while individuals tweeted about wearing pink. Conclusions Tweeting about breast cancer was a singular event. The majority of tweets did not promote any specific preventive behavior. Twitter is being used mostly as a one-way communication tool. To expand the reach of the message and maximize the potential for word-of-mouth marketing using Twitter, organizations need a strategic communications plan to ensure on-going social media conversations. Organizations may consider collaborating with individuals and celebrities in these conversations. Social media communication strategies that emphasize fundraising for breast cancer research seem particularly appropriate.
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            Zika Virus–Related News Coverage and Online Behavior, United States, Guatemala, and Brazil

            To the Editor: News coverage of emerging infectious diseases tends to be episodic and ephemeral rather than thematic, comprehensive, and consistent over time, in part because of newsroom constraints ( 1 – 3 ). Public health authority announcements may help drive peaks in coverage and warrant attention, in particular given the importance of trust and credibility for information acceptance ( 4 , 5 ). Moreover, online search behavior and social media interaction tend to respond to news coverage, especially for novel health issues ( 6 , 7 ). The nature of Zika virus transmission as a novel phenomenon not completely understood by researchers could encourage anxiety and fear among the public ( 8 , 9 ). Patterns of social interaction and search behavior regarding Zika virus can point to opportunities and constraints for education efforts. To assess relationships between news coverage, social media mentions, and online search behavior regarding Zika virus, we studied data available for January 1–February 29, 2016. Although news outlets occasionally covered Zika virus before 2016, our selected period included prominent announcements. For example, on January 28, the World Health Organization declared that Zika virus was “spreading explosively” ( 10 ), and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a travel alert. On February 3, authorities reported the first case that appeared in the United States. Across 3 data sources, we searched for mentions of “Zika” or “El Zika.” We used Google Trends (Google Inc., Mountain View, CA, USA) to assess the number of total searches that originated in the United States, Guatemala, or Brazil for these terms, relative to total Google searches for any topic for the same period. We used a scale of 0–100 (as an indicator of relative volume), with 50 representing half the volume as 100 but not a specific absolute number. Zika virus has been detected in >25 countries since 2015; the countries selected were places where transmission has been relatively widespread or where Zika virus had not yet been but was anticipated to be. We used a monitoring tool, Crimson Hexagon (http://www.crimsonhexagon.com/), to capture the total number of daily Twitter posts (tweets) and focused on tweets geotagged as originating from the United States, Guatemala, or Brazil. Last, we counted Associated Press news wire stories as a proxy for daily volume of Zika news coverage in the Western Hemisphere (Technical Appendix). Using a day as our unit of analysis (i.e., n = 60 in the analysis), we first assessed Pearson product-moment correlations between news coverage, social media mentions, and online search behavior and then fit a time series model. Results suggested prominent but ephemeral peaks in salience and attention, with some variation over time in searches by country (Figure). We found strong positive correlations between news (daily volume) and tweets for all 3 countries (United States, r = 0.86, p 0.05). This finding indicated that we sufficiently reduced the time series to white noise to assume no autocorrelation in residuals. Our model achieved an R2 value of 0.90 and stationary R2 value of 0.53. Associated Press wire stories emerged as a significant and positive predictor (coefficient = 1.52, t = 3.24, p 0.05). Daily news story volume predicted departures from the expected trend in US search behavior related to Zika virus. Figure Comparison of number of tweets by individual persons, Google searches by individual persons, and Associated Press news stories about Zika virus in the United States, Guatemala, and Brazil, January 1–February 29, 2016. Our results suggest that news coverage of public health authority announcements opens brief windows of information sharing, engagement, and searching that offer opportunities to address perceptions and provide preparation and vector control recommendations through education. Sharing and searching are less apparent outside these windows, especially in contexts in which an emerging infectious disease is not yet prevalent. Our findings may not generalize beyond the initial stages of Zika virus transmission in the United States, and future work could obtain appropriate data for investigating the tone of news coverage and online communication in various countries. Nevertheless, recent trends in online information-seeking about Zika virus has been sensitive to official announcements, suggesting the usefulness of pairing announcements with provision of information resources that can be found through search engines. Technical Appendix Detailed methods for analysis of Zika virus–related news coverage and online behavior and summary of data used for the analysis.
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              Effects of newspaper coverage on public knowledge about modifiable cancer risks.

              This study explores the relationship between cancer newspaper coverage and public knowledge about cancer prevention, confirming self-reported associations between news exposure and cancer prevention knowledge with descriptions of newspaper coverage of modifiable cancer risks. Content analyses (N = 954) revealed that newspapers pay relatively little attention to cancer prevention. However, there is greater newspaper attention to tobacco and diet than to exercise, sun, and alcohol. Survey analysis (the National Cancer Institute's Health Information National Trends Survey) revealed that after controlling for differences based on gender, race, age, income, and education, attention to health news was significantly associated with knowledge about cancer risks associated with food and smoking but not for knowledge about exercise, sun, or alcohol. These findings conform to the findings of the content analysis data and provide a validation of a self-reported measure of media exposure, as well as evidence suggesting a threshold below which news coverage may not generate public knowledge about cancer prevention.
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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Cancer Control
                CCX
                spccx
                Cancer Control : Journal of the Moffitt Cancer Center
                SAGE Publications (Sage CA: Los Angeles, CA )
                1073-2748
                1526-2359
                28 February 2019
                Jan-Dec 2019
                : 26
                : 1
                : 1073274819825826
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Department of Health Management & Policy, College of Public Health, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, USA
                [2 ]Department of Communication, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, USA
                [3 ]Department of Sociology, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA
                Author notes
                [*]Sarah C. Vos, Department of Health Management & Policy, College of Public Health, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40536, USA. Email: sarah.vos@ 123456uky.edu
                Article
                10.1177_1073274819825826
                10.1177/1073274819825826
                6396054
                30816059
                31a68140-d8e1-4f17-ac92-ae465d834cad
                © The Author(s) 2019

                This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License ( http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages ( https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).

                History
                : 06 July 2018
                : 12 November 2018
                : 29 November 2018
                Funding
                Funded by: National Science Foundation, FundRef https://doi.org/10.13039/100000001;
                Award ID: CMMI-1536319
                Categories
                Research Article
                Custom metadata
                January-December 2019

                celebrity cancer announcements,twitter,content analysis,cancer prevention,prostate cancer

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