‘If you need a scientific proof… GIVE IT A TRY!!’ A multi-method analysis of Facebook comments around trust and mistrust on cancer’s alternative treatments #AoIR2017
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A multi-method analysis of Facebook comments sparkled by an episode of a popular Italian TV show named PresaDiretta. How networked publics operate in the so-called “post truth” era, analyzing discussions on the „alternative“ cancer treatments on an Italian broadcaster’s Facebook page in reaction to a critical program.
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Similaire à ‘If you need a scientific proof… GIVE IT A TRY!!’ A multi-method analysis of Facebook comments around trust and mistrust on cancer’s alternative treatments #AoIR2017
Similaire à ‘If you need a scientific proof… GIVE IT A TRY!!’ A multi-method analysis of Facebook comments around trust and mistrust on cancer’s alternative treatments #AoIR2017 (20)
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‘If you need a scientific proof… GIVE IT A TRY!!’ A multi-method analysis of Facebook comments around trust and mistrust on cancer’s alternative treatments #AoIR2017
- 1. ‘If you need a scientific proof… GIVE IT A TRY!!’ A multi-method analysis of Facebook comments around trust and mistrust on cancer’s alternative treatments Fabio Giglietto, Giovanni Boccia Artieri, Laura Gemini, Stefano Brilli, Manolo Farci, Elisabetta Zurovac LaRiCA Department of Communication Studies University of Urbino Carlo Bo
- 2. The show in the Italian context
- 3. Literature review - The growing popularity of CAM (Complementary and Alternative Medicine) is part of a wider trend fueled by a persistent decrease in trust toward institutions [Pellegrino 1999; Henderson & Petersen 2002; Zuckerman 2017]; - Patients are more engaged with their care and increasingly using the internet to share personal experiences of health care [Chomutare et al. 2011; Schwartz 2012; Rozenblum & Bates 2013] sometimes in response to “the sterile objectivity” [Fernández- Luque & Bau 2015] of figures and statistics. - Online mediated participation requires an increasing share of agency [Carpentier 2011; Couldry 2012] and a collective dimension of action that often involves the use of narratives of one's own experience [Bennet & Segerberg 2012]
- 4. Research questions 1. RQ1: How the strategies of the counterpublics [Fraser 1990; Kaiser 2017] played out before, during and after the airing of the show?; 2. RQ2: Comments showing a negative sentiment toward alternative medicine includes more references to external sources (scientific publications, other publications, data, links, etc.); 3. RQ3: Comments showing a positive sentiment toward alternative medicine includes more references to personal experiences (third and first person one).
- 5. Methodology | Dataset ● 35 Facebook posts dedicated to the episode published between 2017-01-11 15:54 and 2017-01-16 22:39:31 (9 before, 26 during the airtime); ● 4,671 retrieved comments (28.7% before, 28.3% during, 42.3% after the airtime) created by 1,320 unique contributors.
- 6. Methodology | Content Analysis Codebook DESCRIPTION CODE Sentiment toward CAM Positive, Negative, Neutral, Unrelated Quotes or mentions an external source Yes, No Quotes or mentions a personal experience Yes, No Main comment reference: TV show Yes, No Main comment reference: Facebook post Yes, No Main comment reference: another commenter Yes, No Comment deleted NA N = 4,273 coded comments; 6 coders (all authors); 2 round of training (398 comments excluded from the dataset); Krippendorff's alpha = 0.72.
- 7. Analysis of frequency N = 4,273 (%) Sentiment toward CAM positive 23 negative 52 neutral 6 unrelated 14 Quotes or mentions an external source Yes 14 Quotes or mentions a personal experience Yes 8 Main comment reference (non mutually exclusive) TV show 13 Facebook post 18 Another commenter 65 Deleted comment NA 6
- 8. Data Analysis | RQ1 Contributors N = 1320 (%) AVG comments per contributor Sentiment toward CAM positive 21 5.1 negative 57 3.7 neutral 22 1.5 How the strategies of the counterpublics played out before, during and after the airing of the show?
- 9. Data Analysis | RQ1 How the strategies of the counterpublics played out before, during and after the airing of the show?
- 10. Data Analysis | RQ2 Post comments showing a negative sentiment toward alternative medicine includes more references to external sources Negative sentiment toward CAM tends to report statistics and data from established scientific sources and question the validity of CAM by requesting the opposite side to provide “facts” instead of “personal experiences”. Quotes or mentions an external source Sentiment toward CAM N % Positive 996 22 Negative 2212 16 The chi-square statistic is 122.0888. The p-value is < 0.00001. The result is significant at p < .01 Pressed by these constant requests and by the general frame of the TV show, supporters of CAM treatments responded providing external references to non- scientific publications, partisan websites and... more personal experiences.
- 11. Data Analysis | RQ3 Quotes or mentions a personal experience Sentiment toward CAM N % Positive 996 17 Negative 2212 7 Comments showing a positive sentiment toward alternative medicine includes more references to personal experiences First-hand experiences played out in the form of victimization, freedom of choice and direct testimony; Lifestyle experience: people use personal experience as a way to express their different life choice to point out that the evidence-based movement in the health sciences is outrageously exclusionary and dangerously normative with regards to scientific knowledge The chi-square statistic is 142.1768. The p-value is < 0.00001. The result is significant at p < .01
- 12. Discussion and Conclusions 1. Counterpublics tend to be more active; 2. Furthermore, they are using more frequently both external references and personal experience; 3. At the same time, they are using both strategy in a different way: a. The typology of external references is different; b. They use personal experiences both to criticize official treatments and by promoting their alternative lifestyle.
Notes de l'éditeur
- Hello Everybody! What I’m going to present today is a joint work carried on by a fairly large group of six colleagues. Two of them (Giovanni and Laura) are here in the room with us. The study consists in a multi-method analysis of Facebook comments sparkled by an episode of a popular Italian TV show named PresaDiretta.
- To give you some context, Presa Diretta is an Italian weekly current affairs programme aired in prime time by the public broadcasting network “RAI3”. It is well known among italian tv audience for its in depth reportages about controversial topics. On January 16th 2017, the first part of the weekly episode of Presa Diretta dealt with the issue of cancer’s alternative treatments. The episode was eloquently titled “Ciarlatani” which is the Italian word for “charlatans”, and it has been realized putting together multiple patients stories, showing what happened to them after they decided to believe individuals promoting alternative cures: from Dr. Hamer and the German New Medicine to albanian clinics using bicarbonate injections as a cancer treatment. The tv show has its own official Facebook page where the topic of the report was announced a week before the airdate, though the publishing of a video trailer. This early content immediately sparkled a strong reactions on social media both by the supporters of alternative medicine and traditional cancer treatments. As the Facebook page worked as a catalyzer for the debate, we analyzed its posts and comments in order to understand the relationships between online publics formation and strategies leading to the construction of different regimes of truth. The topic is related to the debate occurring in Italy about obligatory vaccinations and distrust in medicine, as well as the spread of fake news about health.
- One of the most important reasons for the popularity of CAM (Complementary and Alternative Medicine) is the disaffection with «regular», evidence-based medicine. Many people perceive the modern healthcare industry to be driven primarily by financial interests, and not necessarily by the desire to help people (Pellegrino 1999; Henderson, Petersen 2002). The mistrust of mainstream media and the decline in the credibility of many public institutions (Zuckerman, 2017) are leading an increasing part of the population to be skeptical about the objectivity of scientific institutions and of the official health discourse. Patients have become more involved with their care in general, and one of the many results is that they are increasingly using the internet to share and rate their experiences of health care (Rozenblum, Bates 2013). In particular, many people - who might have had negative experiences with medical treatments - use social media to share their own personal histories with other users with the aim of actively expressing thoughts against official medicine (Schwartz 2012) and affirm their general distrust of medical science (Mitra et. al. 2016). Personal experience is so important that the most experienced patients tend to be leaders in the online community of health information (Chomutare et al. 2011). In this way, they can reinforce the validity of the credible and experiential information in place of “the sterile objectivity” of traditional medicine (Fernández-Luque, Bau 2015) insofar figures and statistics are often perceived as rather abstract information with only limited vividness and experiential value (Betsch, C. et al. 2012). Online mediated participation requires an increasing share of agency (Carpentier 2011; Couldry 2012) Everyday life and domestic languages often characterize contents posted online as a way of participating in particular policy issues and of then aggregating with others through voluntary ‘visibility’ practices such as the use of hashtags. In particular, building a collective dimension of action often involves the use of personal stories, the narrative of one's own experience, the production of expressive content that characterizes a condition of personalized politics (Bennet & Segerberg 2012).
- On this backdrop we set out to analyze the participatory practice and strategies employed by the counterpublics of the episode of PresaDiretta. Counterpublics are in this sense critical publics that oppose the mainstream position proposed by the TV shows. More specifically, we observed these strategies over time and with specific reference to personal experiences and use of external references as a mean to reinforce the argumentation in favour or against CAM.
- 1. link to scientific articles (also with tables and data) 2. link to journalistic articles and interviews 3. link to video (documentaries, interviews, etc.) 4. quotations from publications including theoretical books dealing with illness, care, medical philosophy, etc. 5. medical records I’m a cancer patient… I’ve been through this treatment… I know someone who has cancer
- For each unique contributors we calculated an index (-1 to +1) based on the proportion of positive/negative comments in order to measure the leaning of the contributor toward CAM. Using this index, we created three categories of contributors (positive, negative, neutral).
- Further polarization over time when the show start. No effect on the share of contributors sharing a positive attitude toward CAM.
- Hypothesis not confirmed but interesting dynamic once we qualitatively analyzed the comments in this category: Negative sentiment toward CAM tends to report statistics and data from established scientific sources and question the validity of CAM by requesting the opposite side to provide “facts” instead of “personal experiences”. Pressed by these constant requests and by the general frame of the TV show, supporters of CAM treatments responded providing external references to non-scientific publications, partisan websites and... more personal experiences.
- First-hand experiences played out in the form of victimization, freedom of choice and direct testimony; Lifestyle experience: people use personal experience as a way to express their different life choice to point out that the evidence-based movement in the health sciences is outrageously exclusionary and dangerously normative with regards to scientific knowledge
- (RQ1) Despite the fact that the contributors who express a negative sentiment about alternative medicine are more than those who express a positive sentiment, namely the counterpublics, this second category shows to be more active in terms of comments. Their activity is visible and constant on the Presa Diretta FB page before, during and after the airing. The need to oppose the standpoint both of the show and of the supporters of the official medicine is quite clear in our analysis. (RQ 2; RQ 3) In order to demonstrate/show the effectivness of their statements, both the counter publics and the supporters of the official medicine refer both the personal experience and the external sources. Nevertheless the typology of external reference is different in the two groups. The supporters of the official medicine use basically official sources to stress the scientific value of their statements and reference to the personal experience in order to reinforce their position. For this reason they assume a very critical attitude towards the counter publics arguments. Nevertheless, the counter publics tend to blend the emotional discourse, and the empathy linked to the disease, to the scientific discourse. While they reference to the personal experience to show the effectiveness of the alternative medicine and, in particular, to strongly criticize the official treatments, personal experience is the most important argument to promote their alternative lifestyle based on a larger idea of wellness (for example). By referring to a different kind of external sources they show to adopt the scientific semantic (language, code). On the one hand they show to share the scientific code of the official medicine in order to discuss with their counterparts, and, on the other hand, show (try to show) how alternative medicine is scientific as well and not a simple ideology for charlatans.