Being social

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On 20 July 2013, a rumour started to spread in Indonesia that the vaccines used to immunise the country’s children were causing autism. While the public health impact of vaccine panics in Europe or the US is problematic, in a country such as Indonesia – where only 66% of children under two receive full basic immunisation and the vaccine dropout rate is already 23% – it is potentially catastrophic. 

The rumours showed up on Twitter on the same day, at a time when the United Nations’ Pulse Lab was helping Indonesia’s ministry of health to monitor social media use by Indonesians. That’s a significant stream of data: in 2013, Indonesia was the fifth most active country for Twitter use, with 29 million users, and Jakarta the most active city, with its residents creating 2.4% of all tweets. Social media use in Indonesia is arguably well enough developed for us to know more now about the network of ...