Epidemiologycal SIR model to study ’infodemics ́ about child vaccination

Resumo

Technological development has made the internet increasingly accessible in recent decades. However, despite

 the benefits, overexposure to the dissemination of information has become a social concern. The rapid dissemina-
 tion of information with fewer criteria plagued by rumours and fake news has compromised its accuracy, clarity

 and reliability. The process of rapid and massive dissemination of unreliable information has been called an info-
 demic because it behaves an epidemic. Google Trends is a tool developed to show the relative number of searches

 for a given term of interest available on the Google platform. In this work, we apply the classic SIR model of
 mathematical epidemiology to study the case of the time series of the frequency of searches on the controversial

 term ‘childhood vaccination’. The aim of the approach is to assess how accurately the simple form of the epidemi-
 ological model can describe the infodemic process. The matter is treated as complex open system and the model

 parameters like infection and recovery rates from infection are supposed to vary but keeping stable along intervals
 of engagement and disengagement. We show that the model parameters can provide useful information about the
social phenomenon in periods of social media engagement and disengagement in controversial news.