Using Twitter to learn about the autism community

TL;DR

This study explores how Twitter data can be used to understand the behaviors, concerns, and needs of the autism community, providing a new data-driven approach for informing policy and support strategies.

Contribution

It introduces a novel methodology for analyzing Twitter data related to ASD, demonstrating its potential to reveal insights about the community's beliefs and practices.

Findings

Twitter data reflects the concerns and behaviors of the ASD community

Large-scale tweet analysis can identify prevalent beliefs and misinformation

The approach provides a foundation for future research in public health policy

Abstract

Considering the raising socio-economic burden of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), timely and evidence-driven public policy decision making and communication of the latest guidelines pertaining to the treatment and management of the disorder is crucial. Yet evidence suggests that policy makers and medical practitioners do not always have a good understanding of the practices and relevant beliefs of ASD-afflicted individuals' carers who often follow questionable recommendations and adopt advice poorly supported by scientific data. The key goal of the present work is to explore the idea that Twitter, as a highly popular platform for information exchange, could be used as a data-mining source to learn about the population affected by ASD -- their behaviour, concerns, needs etc. To this end, using a large data set of over 11 million harvested tweets as the basis for our investigation, we describe a series of experiments which examine a range of linguistic and semantic aspects of messages posted by individuals interested in ASD. Our findings, the first of their nature in the published scientific literature, strongly motivate additional research on this topic and present a methodological basis for further work.