Categorization and Comparison of Influential Twitter Users and Sources Referenced in Tweets for Two Health-Related Topics

Abstract

The internet’s evolution has had a profound influence on how people acquire medical information. The innovation of web 2.0 has been regarded as the primary motivating factor for people who want to access health-related education. In this work, we identify the URL categories that Twitter users incorporate into their messages when engaging in two selected health-related topics (MMR vaccines and healthy diets). Moreover, we identify the categories of influential message authors who engage in these two topics. Finally, we explore the relationship between different user categories and their patterns of URL sharing. Our results show that when it comes to influential users sharing fake news, users discussing vaccine-related topics were more than twice as likely to share a fake news URLs than those discussing healthy diets.