Dissemination of truvada-related health information through twitter

Twitter, the most popular micro-blogging site, enables users to share their perceptions and experiences to a vast audience. However, questions have arisen about the accuracy and potential to cause harm of user-generated content. Our study aims to examine social media representations about Truvada, a drug approved by the FDA in July 2012 as pre-exposure prophylaxis for use in high risk populations. This study content-analyzed Tweets mentioning “Truvada” to explore dissemination of health information through online media and identify sources of potential misunderstanding about the appropriate use of the drug.

Publicly-available Tweets that contained the keyword “Truvada” were collected through DiscoverText, a cloud-based text analytic platform. A total of 1,435 Tweets posted between November 15 and December 27, 2012 were collected. Through data de-duplication, we detected 123 clusters which contained multiple Tweets of the same content.

We selected and analyzed twelve randomly selected clusters of tweets in English. Tweets about Truvada were posted by individual users as well as organizations who have established a presence on Twitter. For example, in one of the most populated clusters, tweets were linked to content posted on a pornography site. Most tweets shared links and referenced articles about Truvada from other websites.

Our results suggest that little balanced and accurate medical information was provided through the Tweet clusters examined. The thematic content most often present concerned behavior change due to product use, with Truvada being positioned as a perceived substitute for condom use. Misleading and sensationalist “headlines” were not uncommon in larger clusters.