EUREAKALERT!                                                  June 15, 2015
(Scroll down for link to PLOS One article.)

ARISONA STATE UNIVERSITY --

Using Twitter and Google search trend data in the wake of the very limited U.S. Ebola outbreak of October 2014, a team of researchers from Arizona State University, Purdue University and Oregon State University have found that news media is extraordinarily effective in creating public panic.

Because only five people were ultimately infected yet Ebola dominated the U.S. media in the weeks after the first imported case, the researchers set out to determine mass media's impact on people's behavior on social media.

"Social media data have been suggested as a way to track the spread of a disease in a population, but there is a problem that in an emerging outbreak people also use social media to express concern about the situation," explains study team leader Sherry Towers of ASU's Simon A. Levin Mathematical, Computational and Modeling Sciences Center. "It is hard to separate the two effects in a real outbreak situation...."

Towers states that this study will be useful in future outbreak situations because it provides valuable insight into just how strongly news media can manipulate public emotions on a topic.

Read complete story.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-06/asu-rle061515.php

Mass Media and the Contagion of Fear: The Case of Ebola in America

 PLOS ONE  by Sherry Towers and others                                                   June 11, 2015

In the weeks following the first imported case of Ebola in the U. S. on September 29, 2014, coverage of the very limited outbreak dominated the news media, in a manner quite disproportionate to the actual threat to national public health; by the end of October, 2014, there were only four laboratory confirmed cases of Ebola in the entire nation. Public interest in these events was high, as reflected in the millions of Ebola-related Internet searches and tweets performed in the month following the first confirmed case. Use of trending Internet searches and tweets has been proposed in the past for real-time prediction of outbreaks (a field referred to as “digital epidemiology”), but accounting for the biases of public panic has been problematic....

Read complete study.

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0129179