YouTube Proving Fertile Ground For Anti-Vaccination Campaigners

[Guest guest]

" and lead author Keelan have been collaborating for

several years on work aimed at understanding the anti-vaccination

movement. " Well, duh -- get a career. -Lenny

YouTube Proving Fertile Ground For Anti-Vaccination Campaigners

http://www.cbc.ca/cp/technology/071204/z120433A.html

TORONTO - It may be better known as the place to go to watch a

drunken Hasselhoff eating a hamburger, but the video website

YouTube has also become a popular and effective soapbox for people who

believe vaccinations are harmful, a new scientific review reveals.

And public health authorities need to come to grips with the

potential impact YouTube, Facebook and the whole Internet-based

social-networking phenomenon could have on policies like universal

vaccinations, suggested the authors, researchers from the University

of Toronto and York University.

Senior author Dr. Kumanan said he calls the approach

" anti-vaccination 2.0 " - a play on the term Web 2.0.

" This is their new strategy for communicating, " said , an

internal medicine specialist and a public health policy researcher.

" These people believe their viewpoint is not being aired in

public. They believe that they are being shut out of the discourse and

they want to get their viewpoint out. And this is their way of

creating commercials for their viewpoints.

" And they're putting a lot of effort into it. And other people

.... just from the view counts and the ratings, are coming on and

wanting to find out more about these viewpoints. Their videos are

being viewed and rated highly. "

The findings were published Wednesday as a research letter in

the Journal of the American Medical Association.

and lead author Keelan have been collaborating

for several years on work aimed at understanding the anti-vaccination

movement.

When YouTube hit the web and started generating buzz, Keelan

wanted to see if vaccine opponents had recognized it as a unguarded

portal to the world's Internet users. They had.

Among the offerings were documentary-type videos capturing the

views of parents of autistic children who blame particular vaccines or

thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative formerly used in vaccine

manufacture, for the autism. (Thimerosal is still used in the

manufacture of flu vaccine for children.) " It's the perfect venue for

an anecdote, both positive or negative, " Keelan said in an interview.

" And while it's certainly not the communications structure

trained public health professionals would think to use, anecdotes - we

know from research - are incredibly powerful at conveying information

about risk. And they're also incredibly persuasive. "

For this study, the authors searched YouTube for videos on

" immunization " or " vaccination " on Feb. 20, 2007, roughly a year after

the website was launched. They found 153. (On Tuesday, those same

search terms brought up 1,668 hits.) Of that total, 73 were

pro-immunization, 49 were anti-vaccination and 31 were deemed

" ambiguous. " When the researchers looked at view counts and ratings,

the videos with the anti-vaccination messages were watched more often

and were rated more highly by viewers.

" We were startled by our findings, " admitted Keelan, an

assistant professor of public health sciences at the University of

Toronto.

" We were expecting to see maybe some difference between the way

viewers saw the negative videos versus the positive videos. But we

weren't expecting it to be so significant. "

Janis Whitlock, a researcher at Cornell University in Ithaca,

N.Y., has been studying Internet message boards to see what role they

might play in spreading information about self-injury. Whitlock, who

recently shifted her attention to YouTube, agreed the medium is a

powerful one.

" YouTube has become ... the new message board. And it's so much

more powerful - at least for the self-injury stuff, " she said. " You

combined with the text these images and music ... phew... and it's

very intense. "

The authors and Whitlock said public health is going to have to

come to grips with this medium of information dissemination.

" It spreads. It spreads emotions. It spreads ideas. It spreads

methods. It spreads means. It spreads reasons, " said Whitlock, a

professor with Cornell's Family Life Development Center.

" And we can't ignore ... that it's the dissemination of

information, for ill or for good. "

acknowledged that in the past some vaccine advocates

didn't like to address the claims of opponents, assuming any

discussion of what was seen as views from the fringe was

counterproductive. But the Web 2.0 universe requires a new strategy,

he suggested.

" In the past that could work, but it's not going to work

anymore. You could ignore it and not discuss it and perhaps it would

eventually peter out. But now there are ways for people with these

viewpoints to communicate with each other, " he said.

" These sites are now providing people with a mechanism by which

they can bypass the conventional filters and get their messages out.

It can be dangerous. The Internet is valueless in that respect. "