Twitter a hotbed of anti-vaccine sentiment, finds CU Boulder study
Anti-vaccine sentiment is alive and growing in social media, with California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York and Pennsylvania showing the most negative tweets of any states, according to a new five-year CU Boulder study.
In Colorado, Fort Collins ranked particularly high for the prevalence of anti-vaccine tweets. Regions around the country with high affluence and/or a large number of new moms were most likely to be hotbeds of anti-vaccine Twitter users, the study found.
“The debate online is far from over. There is still a very vocal group of people out there who are opposed to vaccines,” said study co-author Chris Vargo, an assistant professor in the College of Media, Communication and Information. “Half of the talk online that we observed about vaccines was negative.”