Erturk, Sinan;
Hudson, Georgie;
Jansli, Sonja M;
Morris, Daniel;
Odoi, Clarissa M;
Wilson, Emma;
Clayton-Turner, Angela;
... Jilka, Sagar; + view all
(2022)
Codeveloping and Evaluating a Campaign to Reduce Dementia Misconceptions on Twitter: Machine Learning Study.
JMIR Infodemiology
, 2
(2)
, Article e36871. 10.2196/36871.
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Abstract
Background Dementia misconceptions on Twitter can have detrimental or harmful effects. Machine learning (ML) models codeveloped with carers provide a method to identify these and help in evaluating awareness campaigns. Objective This study aimed to develop an ML model to distinguish between misconceptions and neutral tweets and to develop, deploy, and evaluate an awareness campaign to tackle dementia misconceptions. Methods Taking 1414 tweets rated by carers from our previous work, we built 4 ML models. Using a 5-fold cross-validation, we evaluated them and performed a further blind validation with carers for the best 2 ML models; from this blind validation, we selected the best model overall. We codeveloped an awareness campaign and collected pre-post campaign tweets (N=4880), classifying them with our model as misconceptions or not. We analyzed dementia tweets from the United Kingdom across the campaign period (N=7124) to investigate how current events influenced misconception prevalence during this time. Results A random forest model best identified misconceptions with an accuracy of 82% from blind validation and found that 37% of the UK tweets (N=7124) about dementia across the campaign period were misconceptions. From this, we could track how the prevalence of misconceptions changed in response to top news stories in the United Kingdom. Misconceptions significantly rose around political topics and were highest (22/28, 79% of the dementia tweets) when there was controversy over the UK government allowing to continue hunting during the COVID-19 pandemic. After our campaign, there was no significant change in the prevalence of misconceptions. Conclusions Through codevelopment with carers, we developed an accurate ML model to predict misconceptions in dementia tweets. Our awareness campaign was ineffective, but similar campaigns could be enhanced through ML to respond to current events that affect misconceptions in real time.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Codeveloping and Evaluating a Campaign to Reduce Dementia Misconceptions on Twitter: Machine Learning Study |
| Location: | Canada |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.2196/36871 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.2196/36871 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work, first published in JMIR Infodemiology, is properly cited. The complete bibliographic information, a link to the original publication on https://infodemiology.jmir.org/, as well as this copyright and license information must be included. |
| Keywords: | Twitter, codevelopment, machine learning, misconceptions, patient and public involvement, social media, stigma |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Division of Psychiatry |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10179971 |
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