Vaccine Hesitancy on Social Media: Sentiment Analysis from June 2011 to April 2019

Abstract

Vaccine hesitancy was one of the ten major threats to global health in 2019, according to the World Health Organisation. Nowadays, social media has an important role in the spread of information, misinformation, and disinformation about vaccines. Monitoring vaccine-related conversations on social media could help us to identify the factors that contribute to vaccine confidence in each historical period and geographical area. We used a hybrid approach to perform an opinion-mining analysis on 1,499,227 vaccine-related tweets published on Twitter from 1st June 2011 to 30th April 2019. Our algorithm classified 69.36% of the tweets as neutral, 21.78% as positive, and 8.86% as negative. The percentage of neutral tweets showed a decreasing tendency, while the proportion of positive and negative tweets increased over time. Peaks in positive tweets were observed every April. The proportion of positive tweets was significantly higher in the middle of the week and decreased during weekends. Negative tweets followed the opposite pattern. Among users with ≥2 tweets, 91.83% had a homogeneous polarised discourse. Positive tweets were more prevalent in Switzerland (71.43%). Negative tweets were most common in the Netherlands (15.53%), Canada (11.32%), Japan (10.74%), and the United States (10.49%). Opinion mining is potentially useful to monitor online vaccine-related concerns and adapt vaccine promotion strategies accordingly.

An analysis of COVID-19 vaccine sentiments and opinions on Twitter

“…Similarly, Hussain and colleagues (2021) found that the overall sentiments of tweets and Facebook posts related to vaccination were positive in the US and UK. In addition, positive tweets showed larger engagement metrics than negative tweets in the present study, which is in line with the findings of Piedrahita-Valdés et al (2021). Moreover, our results showed that vaccine objection and hesitancy were generally more prevalent than vaccine interest, but opinions showed different patterns for each country.…”

“…The current COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in a surge of social media use as a forum for discussing an array of topics about the pandemic, including vaccines. Indeed, social media users can be exposed to negative sentiments and misinformation, which may influence individual views and lead to vaccine hesitancy or refusal (Piedrahita-Valdés et al, 2021). Vaccine hesitancy is considered one of the 10 major threats to global health according to the World Health Organization (WHO) (Puri et al, 2020;Kunneman et al, 2020;Piedrahita-Valdés et al, 2021).…”

“…Indeed, social media users can be exposed to negative sentiments and misinformation, which may influence individual views and lead to vaccine hesitancy or refusal (Piedrahita-Valdés et al, 2021). Vaccine hesitancy is considered one of the 10 major threats to global health according to the World Health Organization (WHO) (Puri et al, 2020;Kunneman et al, 2020;Piedrahita-Valdés et al, 2021). Additionally, misinformation can destroy trust in science and public health authorities and lead to a drop in vaccine uptake (Steffens et al, 2019;Bonnevie et al, 2020b;Hotez et al, 2020).…”

“…Several studies have performed simple descriptive analyses of vaccine related Twitter data to assess people's attitude towards vaccination (DeVerna et al, 2021), and to identify sentiments (Piedrahita-Valdés et al, 2021), dominant opinions (Surian et al, 2016), themes (Nuzhath et al, 2020), information flow between users and most influential users for a particular sentiment (Kang et al, 2017), patterns (Huang et al, 2017;Yin et al, 2021) and discussion communities on vaccination (Bello-Orgaz et al, 2017).…”

#Scamdemic, #Plandemic, or #Scaredemic: What Parler Social Media Platform Tells Us about COVID-19 Vaccine

“…Historically, discussions concerning the topic of vaccines has generated false and misleading claims, fake content, and conspiracy theories across the globe [ 31 , 32 , 33 ]. However, contemporary scholarship has demonstrated that misinformation and conspiracy theories can spread much faster on social media compared to mainstream media and these conspiracy theories have influenced the way people think about vaccinations leading the public to question the need for immunization [ 34 ].…”