Monday, October 30, 2017

NIH Surveils Social Media for Vaccine Beliefs, Study Finds

Social scientists and data analysts: Why not just ask parents who don't vaccinate what they believe? Or read the vaccine damage claims?
Would it make you feel safer to know that your government is monitoring social media for your views on vaccines?  Studying us all like lab rats to isolate the anti-vaccine animals, to determine the nature of the beast, his habitat, his resources, his beliefs? That it is culling all this data to be used one day in large government programs to identify the perpetrators of unsafe opinion with ease and to silence them?
No? Well, it is underway.
A study published this month reveals that social scientists funded by the National Institutes of Health have monitored hundreds of thousands of personal tweets to document "trends of anti-vaccination beliefs" on Twitter and to "geolocate" the users of the social media platform and pigeonhole them in demographic categories.
Anti-vaccine autism tweets coincided with news reports on vaccines were higher than average in five states: California, Massachusetts, New York,   Connecticut and Pennsylvania and spiked in August and September (just when school officials start harassing parents to comply with mandates).
The data analyst set up an interactive website to illustrate anti-vaccine tweets moving around a map of America like a map of election returns. http://chrisjvargo.com/animatedautism/
They call it “Social listening.” “Social listening allows for an examination of vaccination-related beliefs and can serve as an early indicator of shifts in public opinion,” the study says.
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