Vaccine Images on Twitter: Analysis of What Images are Shared

Visual imagery plays a key role in health communication; however, there is little understanding of what aspects of vaccine-related images make them effective communication aids. Twitter, a popular venue for discussions related to vaccination, provides numerous images that are shared with tweets.

The objectives of this study were to understand how images are used in vaccine-related tweets and provide guidance with respect to the characteristics of vaccine-related images that correlate with the higher likelihood of being retweeted.

We collected more than one million vaccine image messages from Twitter and characterized various properties of these images using automated image analytics. We fit a logistic regression model to predict whether or not a vaccine image tweet was retweeted, thus identifying characteristics that correlate with a higher likelihood of being shared. For comparison, we built similar models for the sharing of vaccine news on Facebook and for general image tweets.

Most vaccine-related images are duplicates (125,916/237,478; 53.02%) or taken from other sources, not necessarily created by the author of the tweet. Almost half of the images contain embedded text, and many include images of people and syringes. The visual content is highly correlated with a tweet's textual topics. Vaccine image tweets are twice as likely to be shared as nonimage tweets. The sentiment of an image and the objects shown in the image were the predictive factors in determining whether an image was retweeted.

We are the first to study vaccine images on Twitter. Our findings suggest future directions for the study and use of vaccine imagery and may inform communication strategies around vaccination. Furthermore, our study demonstrates an effective study methodology for image analysis.