Elsevier

Public Health

Volume 213, December 2022, Pages 1-4
Public Health

Short Communication
Public sentiment on the global outbreak of monkeypox: an unsupervised machine learning analysis of 352,182 twitter posts

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.puhe.2022.09.008Get rights and content

Abstract

Objectives

This study aimed to study the public's sentiments on the current monkeypox outbreaks via an unsupervised machine learning analysis of social media posts.

Study design

This was an exploratory analysis of tweets sentiments.

Methods

We extracted original tweets containing the terms ‘monkeypox’, ‘monkey pox’ or ‘monkey_pox’ and posted them in the English language from 6 May 2022 (first case detected in the United Kingdom) to 23 July 2022 (when World Health Organization declared Monkeypox to be a global health emergency). Retweets and duplicate tweets were excluded from study. Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) Named Entity Recognition. This was followed by topic modelling (specifically BERTopic) and manual thematic analysis by the study team, with independent reviews of the topic labels and themes.

Results

Based on topic modelling and thematic analysis of a total of 352,182 Twitter posts, we derived five topics clustered into three major themes related to the public discourse on the ongoing outbreaks. These include concerns of safety, stigmatisation of minority communities, and a general lack of faith in public institutions. The public sentiments underscore growing (and existing) partisanship, personal health worries in relation to the evolving situation, as well as concerns of the media's portrayal of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer and minority communities, which might further stigmatise these groups.

Conclusions

Monkeypox is an emerging infectious disease of public concern. Our study has highlighted important societal issues, including misinformation, political mistrust and anti-gay stigma that should be sensitively considered when designing public health policies to contain the ongoing outbreaks.

Introduction

Monkeypox is endemic to West and Central Africa, and before the current outbreaks, almost all cases outside of Africa were linked to international travel or through imported animals (zoonosis).1 In contrast, the current outbreak seems largely confined to homosexual and bisexual men, and the virus may have become more infectious or be capable of other modes or asymptomatic transmission, which had allowed it to spread around the world rapidly.2 This has fuelled concerns that this outbreak could evolve into a global pandemic.

As there are still several questions and uncertainty at this stage, there are bound to be concerns and anxiety among the general public towards the emerging situation. An important aspect of public health policy is designing and managing public communications. To do so, previous studies have found that social media analyses via Twitter are a feasible and novel method to study public sentiment and emotional manifestations on a given topic.3,4 Therefore, in this infodemiology study, we aimed to study the public sentiments on the emerging global outbreak of monkeypox and, in doing so, highlight and hopefully address the public's concerns.

Section snippets

Methods

Original tweets containing the terms ‘monkeypox’, ‘monkey pox’ or ‘monkey_pox’ and posted in English language from 6 May 2022 (first case detected in the United Kingdom) to 23 July 2022 were extracted. Retweets and duplicate tweets were excluded from study. Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) Named Entity Recognition5 was then applied to select individual users only. Topic modelling, specifically BERTopic,6 was used to generate coherent key concerns on the public

Results

A total of 1,028,326 initial tweets were identified in the period of 6 May to 23 July 2022. A flowchart illustrating the tweets selection process with the help of unsupervised machine learning technology was shown in Fig. 1.

BERTopic generated five topics related to the public discourse surrounding monkeypox, and the total prevalence of these five topics was 68.9%; the remaining 31.1% was from a topic that was omitted from the current results as the model generates a Miscellaneous topic that

Discussion

In this infodemiology study, we used unsupervised machine learning to analyse a large volume of free-text data from social media tweets and further categorised the arising broad themes through iterative thematic analysis. The public sentiments surrounding the global outbreak of monkeypox can be broadly demarcated into three themes: (1) concerns of safety, (2) stigmatisation of minority communities, and (3) lack of faith in public institutions.

First, the concerns of safety are expected,

Ethical approval

Ethical approval was not applicable. No human participants were involved.

Funding

This research did not receive any specific grant funding from agencies in the public, commercial or not for profit sectors.

Competing interests

None to declare.

Author contributions

T.M.L. conceived the original idea. Q.X.N., C.E.Y., Y.L.L., L.K.T.W. and T.M.L. carried out the study and the relevant data analysis and interpretation. All authors contributed to the data analysis and interpretation. All authors discussed the results, contributed to the writing of the

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