Maintenance Notice

Due to necessary scheduled maintenance, the JMIR Publications website will be unavailable from Wednesday, July 01, 2020 at 8:00 PM to 10:00 PM EST. We apologize in advance for any inconvenience this may cause you.

Who will be affected?

Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Infodemiology

Date Submitted: Jun 27, 2022
Date Accepted: Dec 27, 2022

The final, peer-reviewed published version of this preprint can be found here:

Public Figure Vaccination Rhetoric and Vaccine Hesitancy: Retrospective Twitter Analysis

Honcharov V, Li J, Sierra M, Rivadeneira NA, Olazo K, Nguyen TT, Mackey TK, Sarkar U

Public Figure Vaccination Rhetoric and Vaccine Hesitancy: Retrospective Twitter Analysis

JMIR Infodemiology 2023;3:e40575

DOI: 10.2196/40575

PMID: 37113377

PMCID: 10039410

Public Figure Vaccination Rhetoric and Vaccine Hesitancy: A Retrospective Twitter Analysis

  • Vlad Honcharov; 
  • Jiawei Li; 
  • Maribel Sierra; 
  • Natalie A. Rivadeneira; 
  • Kristan Olazo; 
  • Thu T. Nguyen; 
  • Tim K. Mackey; 
  • Urmimala Sarkar

ABSTRACT

Background:

Social media has emerged as a critical mass communication tool, with both health information and misinformation now spread widely online. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, public figures promulgated anti-vaccine attitudes which spread widely on social media platforms. Although anti-vaccine sentiment has pervaded social media throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, it is unclear to what extent interest in public figures is generating anti-vaccine discourse.

Objective:

We examined Twitter messages that included both anti-vaccination hashtags and mentions of public figures jointly, to assess the connection between interest in these individuals and the possible spread of anti-vaccine messages.

Methods:

We used a dataset of COVID-19-related Twitter posts collected from the public streaming Application Programming Interface (API) from March - October 2020 and filtered it for anti-vaccination hashtags: 'antivaxxing', 'antivaxx', antivaxxers', antivax', anti-vaxxer', 'discredit', 'undermine', 'confidence', and 'immune.’ Next, we applied the biterm topic model (BTM) to output topic clusters associated with the entire corpus. Topic clusters were manually screened by examining the top 10 posts most highly correlated in each of the 20 clusters; from which we identified 5 clusters most relevant to public figures and vaccination attitudes. We extracted all messages from these clusters and conducted inductive content analysis to characterize the discourse.

Results:

Our keyword search yielded 118,971 Twitter posts after duplicates were removed, and subsequently, we applied BTM to parse these data into 20 clusters. After removing retweets, we manually screened the top ten tweets associated with each cluster (N=200 messages) to identify clusters associated with public figures. Extraction of these clusters yielded 768 posts for inductive analysis. Most messages were either pro-vaccination (43%) or neutral about vaccination (55%), with only 14/768 (2%) including anti-vaccination messages. Three main themes emerged: (1) anti-vaccination accusation, in which the message accused the public figure of holding anti-vaccination beliefs; (2) using ‘anti-vax’ as an epithet; and (3) stating or implying the negative public health impact of anti-vaccination discourse.

Conclusions:

Most discussion mentioning public figures and vaccination in common hashtags labelled as “anti-vaxx” do not reflect anti-vaccination beliefs. We observed that public figures with known anti-vaccination beliefs, such as Novak Djokovic, face scorn and ridicule on Twitter. For other public figures, who do not profess anti-vaccination sentiments, accusing them of anti-vaccination attitudes is a means of insulting and/or discrediting the public figures rather than discrediting vaccines. The majority of posts in our sample condemned public figures expressing anti-vaxx beliefs by undermining their influence, insulting them, or expressing concerns over public health ramifications. This points to a complex information ecosystem where anti-vaxx sentiment may not reside in common anti-vaxx-related keywords or hashtags, necessitating further assessment of the influence that public figures have on this discourse.


 Citation

Please cite as:

Honcharov V, Li J, Sierra M, Rivadeneira NA, Olazo K, Nguyen TT, Mackey TK, Sarkar U

Public Figure Vaccination Rhetoric and Vaccine Hesitancy: Retrospective Twitter Analysis

JMIR Infodemiology 2023;3:e40575

DOI: 10.2196/40575

PMID: 37113377

PMCID: 10039410

Download PDF


Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.

© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.