Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Infodemiology
Date Submitted: Aug 24, 2025
Open Peer Review Period: Sep 5, 2025 - Oct 31, 2025
Date Accepted: Feb 9, 2026
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
“Crying happy tears” or “mass murder?” A comparative thematic and rhetorical analysis of social media perspectives on a future HIV vaccine
ABSTRACT
Background:
As the prospect of an HIV vaccine nears reality, understanding public discourse around the vaccine is essential for informing communication strategies and addressing misinformation. Social media platforms are influential spaces where public narratives form, yet little research has examined discourse around an HIV vaccine, especially on TikTok.
Objective:
To compare and characterize public discourse about a future HIV vaccine across Twitter and TikTok, identifying prevailing themes, sentiments, and rhetorical strategies to inform public health communication.
Methods:
From over 400,000 tweets and 65,000 TikTok comments, we analyzed the 1,000 most-liked posts on each platform using natural language processing and coded the top 500 posts for rhetorical strategies, sentiment, and themes.
Results:
Our findings reveal expressions of hope and trust in science on both platforms, as well as concerns about institutional corruption and conspiracy theories, such as the belief that the HIV vaccine responds to harm caused by the COVID-19 vaccine. Tweets tended to be more linguistically complex and yielded richer insights, while TikTok comments were shorter and more difficult to interpret without video context. Key rhetorical strategies included conspiracy theories, post hoc reasoning, and emotional appeals.
Conclusions:
This study underscores the need for platform-specific communication strategies to address misinformation and build public trust. Findings offer timely insight into emerging HIV vaccine discourse and highlights actionable opportunities for public health stakeholders to build trust and combat misinformation in advance of vaccine rollout.
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.