An exploratory study of social media users’ engagement with COVID-19 vaccine-related content

Abstract

Background: Facebook, as the world’s most popular social media platform, has been playing various important roles throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, allowing users to produce and share health-related information that both eases and complicates public health communication. However, the characteristics of vaccine-related Facebook content and users’ reaction to the vaccine issue has been an unexplored area to date. Methods: To fill the previous knowledge-gap, this exploratory study wants to understand the communication climate of Facebook on the COVID-19 vaccine issue, including the nature of dominant content and users’ engagement patterns with them. Therefore, the study analyzes the 10,000 most popular Facebook posts with the highest interactions on the vaccine issue. Results: The results show that Facebook users prioritize more vaccine-related news links (71.22%) over other content. The declining interactions on the issue suggests that interaction growth mainly depends on positive news on the vaccine. Finally, users’ reaction to the vaccine issue is dominantly positive, though they may show a highly negative attitude toward vaccine misinformation. Conclusions: A few limitations and strengths of this study are discussed along with values and implications. This study for the first time analyzes Bangla language-based Facebook content related to the COVID-19 vaccine issue, which is largely overlooked in global academic research.

COVID-19 Vaccine Perception in South Korea: Web Crawling Approach (Preprint)

“…For the data crawled with "vaccine," the proportion of positive words (1981/3698, 53.57%) was higher than that of negative words (1717/3698, 46.43%), which revealed that citizens' perceptions of vaccination is somewhat positive. According to a study that examined public perception in Bangladesh based on over 10,000 Facebook posts using "vaccine" as the keyword [22], the proportion of citizens who regarded vaccination positively (74.61%) was similar to this study's findings. Of the positive words used in the posts, "nice" was most regularly used (13.4%), followed by "treatment" (9.9%), "health" (9.3%), "safety" (9.3%), "prevention" (6.0%), "recovery" (3.4%), and "hope" (2.4%).…”

Social media and attitudes towards a COVID-19 vaccination: A systematic review of the literature

“…93 In Bangladesh, Facebook users mostly reacted to vaccinerelated posts positively. 94 Interestingly, the Iranian Twitter users reported similar rates of positive and negative emotions towards foreign and homegrown vaccines explored between April and September 2021 (43 vs 40% were positive and 45 vs 40% were negative, for foreign and domestic vaccines, respectively). 95 The USA general public sentiment showed a decrease in negative sentiment during the first two months after starting the vaccination (after December 2020) with a total of one-third negatively oriented tweets.…”

Mapping automatic social media information disorder. The role of bots and AI in spreading misleading information in society

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