Epidemiologycal SIR model to study ’infodemics ́ about child vaccination
Palavras-chave:
SIR Model, infodemics, Google Trends, child vaccinationResumo
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.