Examining the Utility of Social Media in COVID-19 Vaccination: Unsupervised Learning of 672,133 Twitter Posts

Abstract

Background Although COVID-19 vaccines have recently become available, efforts in global mass vaccination can be hampered by the widespread issue of vaccine hesitancy. Objective The aim of this study was to use social media data to capture close-to-real-time public perspectives and sentiments regarding COVID-19 vaccines, with the intention to understand the key issues that have captured public attention, as well as the barriers and facilitators to successful COVID-19 vaccination. Methods Twitter was searched for tweets related to “COVID-19” and “vaccine” over an 11-week period after November 18, 2020, following a press release regarding the first effective vaccine. An unsupervised machine learning approach (ie, structural topic modeling) was used to identify topics from tweets, with each topic further grouped into themes using manually conducted thematic analysis as well as guided by the theoretical framework of the COM-B (capability, opportunity, and motivation components of behavior) model. Sentiment analysis of the tweets was also performed using the rule-based machine learning model VADER (Valence Aware Dictionary and Sentiment Reasoner). Results Tweets related to COVID-19 vaccines were posted by individuals around the world (N=672,133). Six overarching themes were identified: (1) emotional reactions related to COVID-19 vaccines (19.3%), (2) public concerns related to COVID-19 vaccines (19.6%), (3) discussions about news items related to COVID-19 vaccines (13.3%), (4) public health communications about COVID-19 vaccines (10.3%), (5) discussions about approaches to COVID-19 vaccination drives (17.1%), and (6) discussions about the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines (20.3%). Tweets with negative sentiments largely fell within the themes of emotional reactions and public concerns related to COVID-19 vaccines. Tweets related to facilitators of vaccination showed temporal variations over time, while tweets related to barriers remained largely constant throughout the study period. Conclusions The findings from this study may facilitate the formulation of comprehensive strategies to improve COVID-19 vaccine uptake; they highlight the key processes that require attention in the planning of COVID-19 vaccination and provide feedback on evolving barriers and facilitators in ongoing vaccination drives to allow for further policy tweaks. The findings also illustrate three key roles of social media in COVID-19 vaccination, as follows: surveillance and monitoring, a communication platform, and evaluation of government responses.

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

“…60 Further, vaccine-supportive tweets showed temporal variations over time, while those related to barriers remained mainly constant through time. 61 After conducting the updated search,we were able to locate new studies that focused social data mining on specific regions, thereby providing more insights into themes that were specific to a certain location. However, the topics identified as vaccine-hesitant were unique regardless of the location − such as mistrust into the manufacturing process, science, and reliance on conspiracy theories in Turkey, 62 distrust in the scientific and manufacturing process in China, 63 non-necessity of the vaccine, concerns over safety and side effects, in Canada.…”

Mass Media Use to Learn About COVID-19 and the Non-intention to Be Vaccinated Against COVID-19 in Latin America and Caribbean Countries

“…One study identified top themes related to COVID-19 vaccines in tweets globally. The tweets were related to negative sentiments and largely framed the themes of emotional reactions and public concerns related to COVID-19 vaccines ( 42 ). Tweets related to facilitators of vaccination showed temporal variations over time, while barrier-related tweets remained largely constant throughout the study period ( 42 ).…”

“…The tweets were related to negative sentiments and largely framed the themes of emotional reactions and public concerns related to COVID-19 vaccines ( 42 ). Tweets related to facilitators of vaccination showed temporal variations over time, while barrier-related tweets remained largely constant throughout the study period ( 42 ). A study in Pakistan explored the potential effects of various communication strategies and identified fear appraisal as the most viable communication strategy for combating vaccine hesitancy ( 43 ).…”

Monitoring User Opinions and Side Effects on COVID-19 Vaccines in the Twittersphere: Infodemiology Study of Tweets

“…Similarly, Yan et al [ 9 ] collected and analyzed Reddit comments about COVID-19 vaccines from three Canadian cities (from July 13, 2020, to June 14, 2021), and performed a comparison of the sentiment and main discussion topics among the three locations. Other recent works focused on analyzing sentiment and discussion topics in tweets about COVID-19 generated in other countries and in different time periods [ 20 - 22 ].…”