Gardasil on Twitter: A Content Mining Study Examining Message, Context, and Source Characteristics of Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) Vaccine-Related Tweets

Genital human papilloma virus (HPV) is the most common sexually transmitted virus in the US. Effective HPV vaccines remain controversial and have poor uptake among many adolescent groups. Social media have potential for promoting the HPV vaccine, but little is known about the content or sentiment of social media discussions regarding the vaccine. The purpose of this study was to examine message, context, sentiment, and source characteristics of original HPV- and HPV vaccine-related Twitter posts (tweets) over a 3-month time period. This content mining study used publicly available data purchased from Twitter. One-thousand tweets were randomly selected from a sample of 45,260 English language tweets matching our search criteria and collected from December 2014-January 2015. Tweets were manually coded according to source, context, message, and sentiment characteristics using a coding document developed from previous research. Individuals posted just over half (55%) of tweets, whereas organizations posted 40%. More than half (57%) of all coded tweets were positive, and less than one-fifth were negative. Organizations’ tweets were more likely to be positive than individuals’ tweets. A temporal display of contextual events and tweet spikes demonstrates that positive tweets can increase during newsworthy events (e.g. FDA approval of Gardisil 9). The HPV vaccine was most often discussed under a cancer prevention message frame. In contrast with some existing research, discussions surrounding the HPV vaccine in original Twitter posts are largely positive. Our study reveals opportunities for adolescent health specialists to provide accurate, positive HPV vaccination information via Twitter.