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TORONTO — It may be better known as where you can go to watch a drunken David Hasselhoff eating a hamburger or see Alanis Morissette gyrating to a spoofed version of the song My Humps.
But the video website YouTube has also become a popular and effective soapbox for people who believe vaccinations are harmful, a new scientific review reveals.
And the authors, researchers from the University of Toronto, suggested public health authorities would be unwise to ignore the potential impact on health policy of YouTube and the whole Internet-based social-networking phenomenon.
Senior author Kumanan Wilson said he calls the approach "anti-vaccination 2.0" - a play on the term Web 2.0.
"This is their new strategy for communicating," Dr. Wilson, an internal medicine specialist and a public health policy researcher, said of vaccination opponents.
"It's effective. It's going to be just as powerful as the geographical forms of communication that occurred before. So if we were concerned about the alternative medicine schools as a breeding ground for anti-vaccination sentiment, we need to be concerned about these types of interactive Internet domains as breeding grounds."
Janis Whitlock, a researcher at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., has been studying Internet message boards as a source of information about self injury. Ms. Whitlock, who recently started looking at the role YouTube plays in disseminating ideas about self harm, agreed the medium is a powerful one.
"It spreads. It spreads emotions. It spreads ideas. It spreads methods. It spreads means. It spreads reasons," said the researcher with the university's Family Life Development Center.
"And we can't ignore ... that it's the dissemination of information, for ill or for good."
The University of Toronto article was published today as a research letter in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Dr. Wilson and several colleagues searched YouTube for videos on "immunization" or "vaccination" in February, a year after the website was launched. They found 153. (Yesterday, those same search terms brought up 1,668 hits.)
While the majority of the videos contained positive messages about vaccination - 73 versus 49 - the videos that contained anti-vaccination messages had been watched more often and had higher approval ratings from their viewers. The remaining 31 videos on the topic were ambiguous.
"Ignoring messages is not an option," Dr. Wilson said of this venue for spreading the view that vaccinations are harmful.
"These sites are now providing people with a mechanism by which they can bypass the conventional filters and get their messages out. It can be dangerous. The Internet is valueless in that respect."
