Social scientists and data analysts: Why not just ask parents who don't vaccinate what they believe? Or read the vaccine damage claims?
Would it make you feel safer to know that your government
is monitoring social media for your views on vaccines? Studying us all
like lab rats to isolate the anti-vaccine animals, to determine the
nature of the beast, his habitat, his resources, his beliefs? That it is
culling all this data to be used one day in large government programs
to identify the perpetrators of unsafe opinion with ease and to silence
them?
No? Well, it is underway.
A study published
this month reveals that social scientists funded by the National
Institutes of Health have monitored hundreds of thousands of personal
tweets to document "trends of anti-vaccination beliefs" on Twitter and
to "geolocate" the users of the social media platform and pigeonhole
them in demographic categories.
Anti-vaccine autism tweets coincided with news reports on
vaccines were higher than average in five states: California,
Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut and Pennsylvania and spiked in
August and September (just when school officials start harassing parents
to comply with mandates).
The data analyst set up an interactive website to
illustrate anti-vaccine tweets moving around a map of America like a map
of election returns. http://chrisjvargo.com/animatedautism/
They call it “Social listening.” “Social listening allows
for an examination of vaccination-related beliefs and can serve as an
early indicator of shifts in public opinion,” the study says.
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