JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Social media is an important way for governments to communicate with the public. This is particularly true in times of crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic, during which time government officials had a strong role in promoting public health measures such as vaccines.

Objective:

In Canada, provincial COVID-19 vaccine rollout was delivered in three phases aligned with federal government COVID-19 vaccine guidance for priority populations. In this study, we examined how Canadian public officials used Twitter to engage with the public about vaccine rollout and how this engagement has shaped public response to vaccines across jurisdictions.

Methods:

We conducted a content analysis of tweets posted between December 28, 2020, and August 31, 2021. Leveraging social media artificial intelligence (AI) tool Brandwatch Analytics©, we constructed a list of public officials in three jurisdictions (Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia) organized across six public official types, then conducted an English/French keyword search for tweets about vaccine rollout and delivery that mentioned, retweeted, or replied to the public officials. We identified the top 30 tweets with the highest impressions in each jurisdiction in each of the three phases (approximately a 26-day window) of the vaccine rollout. The metrics of engagement (impressions, retweets, likes, and replies) from the top 30 tweets per phase in each jurisdiction were then extracted for additional annotation. We specifically annotated sentiment towards public officials’ vaccine response (I.e., positive, negative, neutral) in each tweet, and also annotated the type of social media engagement. A thematic analysis of tweets was then conducted to add nuance to extracted data characterizing sentiment and interaction type.

Results:

In total, 142 user accounts of public officials were included in our search derived from three jurisdictions: Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia. 270 tweets were included in the content analysis. Principal results reveal that public officials mostly used Twitter for one-way information dissemination, and the most viewed tweets are updates by public officials on the volume of vaccines administered across all provinces. Information-provisional tweets from provincial government and public health authorities or municipal leaders are more prominent than tweets by other public official groups. Sentiment across provinces varied, with positive sentiment largely among tweets by public officials Ontario. Instances of negative sentiment were from public officials who criticized vaccine rollout not meeting stated goals.

Conclusions:

As governments continue to promote the uptake of the COVID-19 “booster” doses, findings from this study are useful in informing how governments can best utilize social media to engage with the public to achieve democratic goals.