Why were Twitter Users Obsessed with Vitamin D during the first year of the pandemic?

  1. Alexandra Mavroeidi
  2. Ryan Innes
  3. Esperanza Miyake
  4. Diane Pennington

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Abstract

The aim of this study was to explore how the relationship between vitamin D and COVID-19 has been represented on the social media site Twitter. NCapture was used to collect textual Tweets on a weekly basis for three months during the pandemic. In total, 21,140 Tweets containing the keywords “vitamin D” and “COVID” were collected and imported to NVivo12. An inductive thematic analysis was carried out on the Tweets collected on the first (12/2/2021) and last week (21/5/2021) of the recording period to identify themes and subthemes. Quality control of the coding was conducted on a sample of the dataset (20%). Data were also compared to the “ground truth” to explore the accuracy of media outputs. The four main themes identified were “association of vitamin D with COVID-19”, “politically informed views”, “vitamin D deficiency” and “vitamin D sources”. When compared to the ground truth, the majority of information relating to the key findings was ‘incorrect’ for all of the findings. This study contributes to the area of research by highlighting the extent of the issue social media sites face with health-related misinformation. In the context of COVID-19, it is important that sites such as Twitter improve their existing misinformation policies, as misinformation can be detrimental in disease prevention.

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  1. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2022.04.13.22273830: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    EthicsIRB: Ethical approval was obtained through the Strathclyde University Computer and Information Sciences Ethics Committee on 1/2/2021 (ID: 1303).
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.

    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:
    The strengths and weaknesses of this study must be considered. Collecting Tweets on a weekly basis provided a high volume of data and allowed researchers to track changes in the number of Tweets shared (Figure 1), providing a good insight into Twitter users behaviours throughout this time period. However, NCapture can only collect Tweets published in the previous eight days, meaning that Twitter data from the early stages of the pandemic were unavailable. It is possible that insights from Twitter would be different if data from earlier periods of the pandemic were available. Furthermore, data was only obtained from Twitter. Different social media platforms contain different types of information (Cinelli et al., 2020), so it is likely that if data were also analysed from other platforms that the results would differ. Additionally, as only textual data was collected, other types of data such as images, videos and emojis were not included in the analysis. Therefore, the nuance of other data types was not captured. It is also important to note that the only keywords used were “vitamin D” and “COVID”, meaning that Tweets using abbreviations such as “vit D” were not collected. This study highlights the extent of the issue social media sites face with misinformation. Companies like Twitter have an obligation to fight misinformation, as it can be detrimental in disease prevention (Mejia et al., 2020). Future research should consider insights from various social media platforms. Diffe...

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

    Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.

    About SciScore

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  2. Version published to 10.1101/2022.04.13.22273830v1 on medRxiv