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The Association Between State-Level Racial Attitudes Assessed From Twitter Data and Adverse Birth Outcomes:
Thu T Nguyen1, Nikki Adams2, Dina Huang3
1Department of Family and Community Medicine, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, United States.
JMIR Public Health and Surveillance
|April 17, 2020
Summary
Negative social media sentiment regarding race is linked to adverse birth outcomes, including low birth weight and preterm birth, for all racial groups. This highlights the impact of online racial bias on public health.
Area of Science:
- Public Health
- Social Epidemiology
- Computational Social Science
Background:
- Persistent and widening racial disparities in US birth outcomes are a significant public health concern.
- Racism, both interpersonal and structural, is implicated, but measuring its impact has been challenging.
- Existing research often relies on self-reported discrimination, with limited national-level data on racial attitudes.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the association between state-level Twitter-derived sentiments about racial/ethnic minorities and birth outcomes.
- To explore whether online racial sentiment can serve as a proxy for societal racial bias impacting maternal and infant health.
Main Methods:
- Collected over 26 million race-related tweets from June 2015 to December 2017.
- Used machine learning (support vector machine) for sentiment analysis, achieving 91% accuracy.
- Merged annual state-level sentiment data with birth records for nearly 10 million singleton births (2015-2017), analyzing low birth weight and preterm birth.
Main Results:
- States with the highest negative sentiment towards minorities showed an 8% increase in low birth weight and an 8% increase in preterm birth.
- Negative online sentiment was associated with adverse birth outcomes across all populations, including non-Hispanic white individuals.
- Negative sentiment targeting specific minority groups correlated with poorer birth outcomes for those groups.
Conclusions:
- A negative racial social context, reflected in online sentiment, is associated with adverse birth outcomes for both minority and non-minority populations.
- This study demonstrates a novel method for measuring societal racial bias and its public health implications.
- Findings underscore the need to address online racial bias to improve birth outcomes.
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