Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Public Health and Surveillance
Date Submitted: May 23, 2021
Date Accepted: Oct 12, 2021
Date Submitted to PubMed: Oct 15, 2021
COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy on Social Media: Building a Public Twitter Dataset of Anti-vaccine Content, Vaccine Misinformation and Conspiracies
ABSTRACT
Background:
False claims about COVID-19 vaccines can undermine public trust in ongoing vaccination campaigns, thus posing a threat to global public health. Misinformation originating from various sources has been spreading online since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Anti-vaccine activists have also begun to utilize platforms like Twitter to share their views. To properly understand the phenomenon of vaccine hesitancy through the lens of online social media, it is of greatest importance to gather the relevant data.
Objective:
In this paper, we describe a dataset of Twitter posts that exhibit a strong anti-vaccine stance. The dataset is made available to the research community via our AvaxTweets dataset GitHub repository.
Methods:
We started the ongoing data collection on October 18, 2020, leveraging the Twitter streaming application programming interface (API) to follow a set of specific anti-vaccine related keywords. Additionally, we collect the historical tweets of the set of accounts that engaged in spreading anti-vaccination narratives at some point during 2020.
Results:
Since the inception of our collection, we have published two collections: a) a streaming keyword-centered data collection with more than 1.8 million tweets, and b) a historical account-level collection with more than 135 million tweets. In this paper we present descriptive analyses showing the volume of activity over time, geographical distributions, topics, news sources, and inferred accounts’ political leaning.
Conclusions:
The vaccine-related misinformation on social media may exacerbate the levels of vaccine hesitancy, hampering the progress toward vaccine-induced herd immunity, and potentially increase infections related to new COVID-19 variants. For these reasons, understanding vaccine hesitancy through the lens of social media is of paramount importance. Since data access is the first obstacle to attain that, we publish the dataset that can be used in studying anti-vaccine misinformation on social media and enable a better understanding of vaccine hesitancy.
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