Vaccine hesitancy has been a growing public health issue, but during COVID-19, understanding vaccine hesitancy and promote vaccine favorability takes on a troubling immediacy. With the growing political polarization on scientific issues, the COVID-19 vaccine-related sentiment has recently been divided across ideological lines. This study aims to understand how vaccine favorability and specific vaccine-related concerns including possible side effects, distrust in medical professionals, and conspiratorial beliefs concerning COVID-19 vaccines were articulated and transmitted by Twitter users from opposing ideological camps and with different follower scopes. Using a combination of computational approaches, including supervised machine-learning and structural topic modeling, we examined tweets surrounding COVID-19 vaccination ( N = 16,959) from 1 March to 30 June 2020. Results from linear mixed-effects models suggested that Twitter users high on conservative ideology and with a standard instead of large follower scope tend to express less favorable vaccine-related sentiments and talk more about vaccine side effects, distrust of medical professionals, and conspiracy theories. There is also an interaction effect where liberals with large follower scope expressed the least amount of distrust of medical professionals, whereas extreme conservatives expressed greater distrust for health professionals, regardless of their follower scope. Finally, structural topic modeling revealed distinct topical focuses among liberal and conservative users. Theoretical and practical implications for leveraging social media in effective health communication practice were discussed.

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BackgroundThe lack of organ donors has become a barrier for the development of organ transplantation programs, and many countries are currently facing a severe shortage of deceased organs. Media campaigns on social media have the potential to promote organ donation. However, little is known about what kind of media content is the most appropriate for this purpose.ObjectiveThis study aimed to analyze media posts regarding organ donation on Weibo, a social media platform, and to identify the media themes that are most advantageous in promoting public awareness and attitudes concerning organ donation.MethodsBased on 16 million social media users’ posts randomly extracted from January 1 to December 31, 2017, 1507 reposts of 141 distinct media posts relevant to organ donation were found. We analyzed the media posts’ themes and examined their effects in promoting public awareness about organ donation by comparing the number of reposts and comments they prompted. The themes’ impact on attitude toward organ donation was gauged using the comments indicating support and intentions for organ donation.ResultsOverall, 5 major themes were identified from the media posts, among which “organ donation behaviors” constituted the highest proportion (58/141, 41.13%). However, themes of “statistical descriptions of organ donation” and “meaningfulness of donation” were the most influential in promoting awareness on organ donation: approximately 3 of 10 commenters for the former theme and 2 of 10 commenters for the latter expressed intentions to become organ donors. These two themes, along with “meaningfulness of organ donation for society,” a subtheme of “meaningfulness of donation,” were the most effective for evoking support and intentions for donation.ConclusionsA discrepancy was revealed between the media themes that were the most salient on the media agenda and those that were the most effective in increasing organ donation awareness and intentions on social media. These findings provide guidance for campaigns on organ donation. The results also suggest the potential of campaigns on social media for promoting prosocial health behaviors and highlight the importance of strategic message design for serving this goal.

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