ELSIcon2024: Behind the screens: A case study of misconceptions reflected in social media on the role of health-related consumer genomics services in IGG

ELSIcon2024 • Paper • June 10, 2024 

Authors:

Speaker: Nathan Reed – Northwestern University

When novel applications of science emerge, social media is one of the first places discussion appears. After the Golden State Killer’s arrest, posts about investigative genetic genealogy (IGG) spread on Twitter (now X). Analyzing social media data can provide insight into public opinion as it emerges on the ground, without researcher intervention. While social media data can be too voluminous for manual analysis, automated topic clustering renders it manageable for researcher-led sentiment analysis. Social media discussions of IGG can provide insight into ELSI issues. Specifically, we were interested in characterizing the misconceptions in social media regarding the involvement (or lack thereof) of health-related consumer genomics services in IGG and the effect of this involvement on public trust. We focused on 23andMe in particular as a health-related tool. Our prior research generated a dataset of 24,210 tweets regarding IGG between April 2018 - October 2022, which we partially characterized for temporal trends and sentiment. We sampled this dataset by filtering for terms related to consumer genomics (e.g., 23andMe), resulting in a subset of 746 tweets. We updated the dataset through December 2023 using the same search terms and filters. The resulting posts were coded for misconceptions, sentiment (e.g., positive, negative), position on IGG (e.g., hesitant, receptive), and purpose (e.g., opinion, share news). Characterizing social media data provided an understanding of how misconceptions and attitudes on IGG were linked. Our novel methodology offers an effective way for researchers to characterize conversations and public opinion regarding various topics for ELSI research.

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