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CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 · Indian J Plast Surg 2022; 55(01): 031-035
DOI: 10.1055/s-0041-1740080
Original Article

Mining the Twittersphere: Insights about Public Interest in Facial Reanimation Surgery from a Decade of Twitter Data

Hayeem L. Rudy
1   The Division of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, Department of Surgery, Montefiore Medical Center, Bronx, New York, United States
,
Joseph A. Ricci
1   The Division of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, Department of Surgery, Montefiore Medical Center, Bronx, New York, United States
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Abstract

Background With 500 million tweets posted daily, Twitter can provide valuable insights about public discourse surrounding niche topics, such as facial paralysis surgery. This study aims to describe public interest on Twitter relating to facial paralysis and facial reanimation surgery over the last decade.

Methods Tweets containing the keywords “facial paralysis” and “Bell's palsy” posted between January 1, 2009, and January 1, 2019, were collected using Twitter Scraper. Tweets were screened by keywords relating to facial paralysis, and usage of these terms trended over time. Logistic regression was used to identify correlations between the quantity of publications per year and these terms posted on Twitter.

Results 32,880 tweets were made during the study period, with no significant difference in the number of tweets per year. A very strong (r = 0.8–1.0) positive correlation was found between time and frequency of the term “plastic surgery” and “transfer” (p < 0.05). A strong (r = 0.60–0.79) correlation was found between time and frequency for the following terms: “facial reanimation,” “gracilis,” “masseter,” “plastics,” “transplant” (p < 0.05). A total of 619 studies with the keyword “facial reanimation” were published in PubMed within the study period. A very strong, positive correlation between publications per year and frequency was found for the terms “plastic surgery,” “function” and “esthetic,” and a strong, positive correlation was found for the “plastics,” “transplant,” “Botox,” “surgery,” “cosmetic,” “aesthetic” and “injection” (p < 0.05).

Conclusions An increasing number of discussion about facial paralysis on Twitter correlates with increased publications and likely surgeon discourse on facial reanimation surgery, driving public interest.

Keywords

facial paralysis - facial reanimation - twitter - social media - web scraping - data mining

Author Contributions

H.R. designed the project, collected data, and drafted the manuscript.


J.R. designed the project, drafted the manuscript, edited the manuscript, and provided project oversight.


Financial Disclosure Statement

The authors have no financial disclosures. This work was not supported by any external sources of funding.




Publication History

Article published online:
13 December 2021

© 2021. Association of Plastic Surgeons of India. This is an open access article published by Thieme under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonDerivative-NonCommercial License, permitting copying and reproduction so long as the original work is given appropriate credit. Contents may not be used for commercial purposes, or adapted, remixed, transformed or built upon. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)

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