Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Formative Research
Date Submitted: Jun 28, 2023
Date Accepted: Oct 29, 2023
Incivility in COVID-19 Vaccine Mandate Discourse and Moral Foundations: A Natural Language Processing Approach
ABSTRACT
Background:
Vaccine hesitancy poses a significant threat to efforts to mitigate the harmful effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. To combat vaccine hesitancy, officials in the United States issued vaccine mandates, which were met with strong anti-vaccine discourse on social media platforms such as Reddit. The politicized and polarized nature of COVID-19 on social media has fueled uncivil discourse related to vaccine mandates. Moral foundations theory poses individuals make decisions to express approval or disapproval (i.e., uncivil discourse) based on innate moral values.
Objective:
The current study examines the moral foundations underlying uncivil COVID-19 vaccine discourse. We examine whether moral foundations are associated with dimensions of incivility. We further explore if there are any differences in the presence of incivility between the r/coronaviruscirclejerk and r/lockdownskepticism subreddits.
Methods:
Natural Language Processing methodologies were leveraged to analyze the moral foundations underlying uncivil discourse in two prominent anti-vaccine subreddits, r/coronaviruscirclejerk and r/lockdownskepticism, since their inception in March 2022. Results revealed that all moral foundations except authority were positively associated with dimensions of incivility (i.e., toxicity, severe toxicity, insult, profanity, threat, and identity attacks).
Results:
Findings suggest that moral foundations play a role in the psychological processes underlying uncivil vaccine mandate discourse. Specifically, we find significant associations between all moral foundations and dimensions of incivility except for the authority foundation. We also find statistically significant differences between r/coronaviruscirclejerk and r/lockdownskepticism for the presence of the dimensions of incivility.
Conclusions:
This study shows that moral foundations may play a significant role in the presence of incivility in vaccine discourse. Public health practitioners should unravel distinct dimensions of uncivil behavior and rely on targeted appeals to individuals' salient moral foundations to reframe vaccine-hesitant individuals' perspectives.
Citation
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Copyright
© 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.