COVID-19 became an issue affecting different parts of our life. Different communication campaigns use vaccination as an information peg, argument in discussions, and so on. As a result, they have an impact on people’s attitudes to immunization. We applied the message analysis to the dataset of social media posts from Ukraine to detect the messages used in the communication regarding the vaccine and reveal communication campaigns propagating these messages. We found five campaigns launched by different actors and shaping the attitude to COVID-19 immunization expressed in the people’s posts. The incoherence of the information about immunization and authorities’ inconsistency in the communications about vaccines may lead to vaccine hesitancy and undermine confidence in the sources of the official information about COVID-19. Vaccine hesitancy has multifaceted nature and cannot be reduced just to politicians’ conspiracy theories or far-right propaganda.
One of the most prominent parts of the 2019 Ukrainian presidential election was the mediatized topic of achieving Ukrainian church independence, and its symbol, the tomos document received from the Ecumenical Patriarch in January 2019. This process was a part of incumbent president Petro Poroshenko’s electoral campaign. Narrative analysis of this topic showed that it had a structure similar to that of classic Hollywood plots. It is unlike most other media narratives present in the information space. We prove that this topic had a major influence on its audience: media attention to the topic of Tomos was found to be closely correlated to Google search data associated with the ‘tomos’ search term and with electoral support for Poroshenko. However, this narrative`s audience was limited to the patriotic electorate, thus Poroshenko did not win the election. Nevertheless, the Tomos story became so influential that it can be
considered a part of national and strategic narratives.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.