Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Public Health and Surveillance
Date Submitted: Apr 20, 2021
Date Accepted: Sep 18, 2021
Date Submitted to PubMed: Sep 28, 2021
Examining the Utility of Social Media in COVID-19 Vaccination: Unsupervised Learning of 672,133 Twitter Posts
ABSTRACT
Background:
Although COVID-19 vaccines have recently become available, efforts in global mass vaccination can be hampered by the widespread issue of vaccine hesitancy.
Objective:
This study utilized social media data to capture close-to-real-time public perspectives and sentiments on COVID-19 vaccine, with the intention to identify useful strategies that may improve vaccine uptake in ongoing COVID-19 vaccination drive.
Methods:
Twitter was searched for feeds related to ‘COVID-19’ and ‘vaccine’, over an eleven-week period after 18th November 2020 (following press release on the first effective vaccine). An unsupervised machine-learning approach (Structural Topic Modelling) was used to identify topics from tweets, with each topic further grouped into themes using manually conducted thematic analysis. Sentiment analysis of the tweets was also performed, using a rule-based machine-learning model (VADER).
Results:
Tweets related to COVID-19 vaccine were posted by individuals around the world (n=672133). Six overarching themes could be identified – Emotional reactions related to COVID-19 vaccine (19.3%), Public concerns related to COVID-19 vaccine (19.6%), Discussions on news related to COVID-19 vaccine (13.3%), Public health communications on COVID-19 vaccine (10.3%), Discussions on approach to COVID-19 vaccination drive (17.1%), and Discussions on distribution of COVID-19 vaccine (20.3%). The 6 themes demonstrated variations over time as well as across continents. Tweets with negative sentiment largely fell within the themes of Emotional reactions and Public concerns.
Conclusions:
The findings may be summarized into an explanatory model to outline key drivers of COVID-19 vaccination, as well as inform strategies to improve vaccine uptake. The findings also illustrate 3 key roles of social media in COVID-19 vaccination – for surveillance and monitoring, as a communication platform, and for evaluation of government responses. Clinical Trial: Not Applicable
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