YouTube proving fertile ground for anti-vaccination campaigners

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YouTube proving fertile ground for anti-vaccination campaigners

Published: Tuesday, December 4, 2007 | 6:46 PM ET

Canadian Press: Helen Branswell, Medical Reporter,

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. "

© The Canadian Press, 2007

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