JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Despite vaccine availability, vaccine hesitancy has inhibited public health officials’ efforts to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. While some U.S. elected officials have responded by issuing vaccine mandates, others have amplified vaccine hesitancy by broadcasting messages that minimize vaccine efficacy. The politically polarized nature of COVID-19 information on social media has given rise to incivility, wherein health attitudes often hinge more on political ideology than science.

Objective:

To the best of our knowledge, incivility has not been studied in the context of discourse regarding COVID-19 vaccines and mandates. Specifically, there is little focus on the psychological processes that elicit uncivil vaccine discourse and behaviors. Thus, we investigate three psychological processes theorized to predict discourse incivility–namely, anxiety, anger, and sadness.

Methods:

We employed two different natural language processing approaches: (1) Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count and (2) Google Perspective API to analyze a dataset of 8014 tweets about COVID-19 vaccine mandates.

Results:

This study resolves discrepant operationalizations of incivility by introducing incivility as a multifaceted construct and explores the distinct emotional processes underlying five dimensions of discourse incivility. Findings reveal that three types of emotions, anxiety, anger, and sadness were uniquely associated with dimensions of incivility.

Conclusions:

The results suggest that our multidimensional approach to incivility is a promising alternative to understanding and intervening in the psychological processes underlying uncivil vaccine discourse. Given the need for real-time monitoring and automated responses to the spread of health information and misinformation online, social media platforms can harness Google Perspective API to offer users immediate, automated feedback when it detects a comment is uncivil.