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?:abstract
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BACKGROUND: Twitter has emerged as a novel way for physicians to share ideas and advocate for policy change #ThisIsOurLane and #GetUsPPE are examples of nationwide healthcare-led Twitter campaigns that went viral OBJECTIVE: Healthcare-initiated Twitter hashtags regarding major public health topics have gained national attention, but their content has not been systematically examined We hypothesized that Twitter discourse on two epidemics (firearm injury and COVID) would differ between tweets with healthcare-initiated hashtags (#ThisIsOurLane and #GetUsPPE) versus those with non-healthcare-initiated hashtags (#gunviolence and #COVID19) METHODS: Using natural language processing, we compared content, affect, and authorship of a random 1% of tweets using #ThisIsOurLane (Nov 2018-Oct 2019) and #GetUsPPE (March-May 2020), compared to #gunviolence and #COVID19 tweets, respectively We extracted the relative frequency of single words and phrases and created two sets of features: 1) An open vocabulary feature set to create 50 data-driven-determined word clusters to evaluate content of tweets 2) A closed vocabulary feature for psycholinguistic (tone) categorization among case and comparator tweets In accordance with conventional linguistic analysis, we used a p-value of <0 001, after adjusting for multiple comparisons using Bonferroni\'s correction, to identify potentially meaningful correlations between language features and outcomes RESULTS: Tweets using #ThisIsOurLane and #GetUsPPE were more likely to contain healthcare-specific language, more language denoting positive emotions, affiliation, and group identity, and more action-oriented content compared to tweets with #GunViolence or #COVID19, respectively CONCLUSIONS: Tweets with healthcare-led hashtags expressed more positivity and more action-oriented language than the comparison hashtags As social media is increasingly used for news discourse, public education and grassroots organizing, the public health community can take advantage of social media\'s broad reach to amplify truthful, actionable messages around public health issues CLINICALTRIAL: Not applicable
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