JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

The rising use of social media as an interactive health information ecosystem has led to the sharing of vaccine information and misinformation in an unprecedented manner. However, there is little research exploring the role of social media in the public discourse around the Covid-19 vaccine particularly amongst ethnic minority communities, who have the highest rates of vaccine hesitancy (delay or refusal of vaccination despite availability of services).

Objective:

This study aims to provide a broad overview of the discourse around Covid-19 vaccination on social media amongst and related to ethnic minority communities in the UK. We characterised social media posts by identifying underlying themes and highlighting patterns of conversations.

Methods:

Social media data from the UK was extracted from Twitter and YouTube using software Netlytics and YouTube Data Tools (YTDT) to provide a ‘snapshot’ of the discourse between January to April 2022. Sentiment and stance analysis were applied to better understand the overall tone of social media posts and opinions portrayed. Discourse and topic analysis were also applied to provide insight into the most frequent and weighted keywords and themes of conversations on social media platforms.

Results:

A total of 260 tweets and 156 comments from 4 YouTube videos were included in our analysis. In general YouTube tended to depict a higher percentage of negative sentiment and stance comments than Twitter. Furthermore, our analysis suggests that the main areas of discussion were related to concerns about vaccine programme implementation, in particular the focus on ethnic minorities in vaccination campaigns, questions over vaccination development and side effects, and wider systemic issues such as racism.

Conclusions:

Our study suggests a shift in narrative from concerns about the Covid-19 vaccine itself, towards the strategies utilised in vaccination implementation, in particular the targeting of ethnic minority groups through vaccination campaigns. The shortfalls in the communication strategies adopted to relay public health information to minority groups during the pandemic must be acknowledged if any meaningful improvement is to be made moving forward to strengthen both future vaccination campaigns and other public health interventions targeted towards these groups.