1. Analyzing Twitter Discourse On Genetic Testing
Alexandros Mittos, Jeremy Blackburn, Emiliano De Cristofaro
GenoPri’18
Basel, Switzerland
@mittosis

2. April 2017
August 2017
October 2018

3. Focus: Precision Medicine Aims for: 1M seq. genomes Has so far: 25K
Source:
Source:
Focus: Precision Medicine
Aims for: 1M seq. genomes
Has so far: 25K
Focus: Rare Diseases
Aims for: 100K seq. genomes
Has so far: 50K 4

5. Research Questions
What are the tweets related to genetic testing about?
Which accounts are the most active in tweeting and what do they talk about?
Is the discussion about genetic testing dominated by certain keywords, themes, or companies?
What is the overall sentiment and what topics relate to more negative sentiment?

6. Methodology 10 keywords related to DTC genetic testing companies*
3 keywords related to genomics initiatives
Crawl all results between Jan 1, 2015 and Jul 31, 2017
* List compiled from

7. Methodology
302K tweets related to genetic testing from 113K unique users
163K random English tweets
We crawl the latest 1,000 from a random 20% sample of the users tweeting about the most popular DTC companies

8. Findings
The two most successful DTC companies have the highest number of tweets (23andMe: 132K, AncestryDNA: 29K)
AncestryDNA has more than double the customers of 23andMe
But 23andMe produces 5 times more tweets
More than 20K out of 132K are directly related to 23andMe’s controversy with FDA

9. Findings
Users tweeting about genetic testing are also interested in digital health and technology
Conversation is dominated by people with a vested interest in its success (e.g., medical professionals, specialist journalists, entrepreneurs)

10. Findings Sentiment re. DTC companies: Neutral
Sentiment re. genomics initiatives: Positive
Some DTC companies conduct aggressive marketing campaigns on Twitter
E.g., 1 out 8 tweets containing the keyword AncestryDNA also contain promotional hashtags (#sweepstakes)
“I believe I’ve discovered Discover yours for the chance to win an AncestryDNA Kit. #sweepstakes journeythroughhistorysweeps.com.”

11. Sharing Genetic Test Results Online
A non-negligible amount of users share and discuss screenshots of their ancestry test results, despite the possible privacy implications
Out of all tweets with pictures:
23andMe: 3.40%
AncestryDNA: 5.15%

12. Privacy Concerns
We find users expressing concerns about privacy and data protection.
How:
Searching for the words ‘privacy’/’private’ in our dataset returns 2K tweets.
Manually examining the most negative tweets (sentiment analysis)

13. Racism We find users using genetic testing in a racist context How:
“I wanna do that 23andMe so bad! I’m kinda scared what my results will be tho lmao I’m prob like half black tbh” (Jan 13, 2017)
Response: “I was too just do it and never tell anyone if you’re a halfbreed haha”
We find users using genetic testing in a racist context
How:
We manually examine the 2K most negative tweets of our dataset using the tool SentiStrength.
“Get this race mixing shit off my time line!!” (Mar 23, 2017)”
(in response to a 23andMe video about ancestry)
“I’d like to get kit but, I’m worried about the results. Just my luck, I’d have non-white/kike ancestors. #UltimateBlackpill”
(May 30, 2017)

14. Limitations
Twitter is not the only social network. Other social networks may produce different results.
The 140 characters limit (now raised to 240) may inhibit the expression of complex feelings and thoughts.

15. Future Work
Genetic testing is increasingly associated to ethical, legal, and societal concerns
As genetic testing becomes more ‘popular’, it is important to understand better how people feel about it and react to it from a quantitative point of view
We need to dig deeper to other online communities to understand the context under which people use genetic testing
This includes broadly used social websites (Facebook, Reddit) and “alternative” ones (4chan, Gab)

16. Thank You!
Questions?
@mittosis