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arXiv · 2403.09349

From Pro, Anti to Informative and Hesitant: An Infoveillance study of COVID-19 vaccines and vaccination discourse on Twitter

Pardeep Singh·Rabindra Lamsal·Monika Singh·Satish Chand·Bhawna Shishodia
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Abstract

COVID-19 pandemic has brought unprecedented challenges to the world, and vaccination has been a key strategy to combat the disease. Since Twitter is one of the most widely used public microblogging platforms, researchers have analysed COVID-19 vaccines and vaccination Twitter discourse to explore the conversational dynamics around the topic. While contributing to the crisis informatics literature, we curate a large-scale geotagged Twitter dataset, GeoCovaxTweets Extended, and explore the discourse through multiple spatiotemporal analyses. This dataset covers a longer time span of 38 months, from the announcement of the first vaccine to the availability of booster doses. Results show that 43.4% of the collected tweets, although containing phrases and keywords related to vaccines and vaccinations, were unrelated to the COVID-19 context. In total, 23.1% of the discussions on vaccines and vaccinations were classified as Pro, 16% as Hesitant, 11.4% as Anti, and 6.1% as Informative. The trend shifted towards Pro and Informative tweets globally as vaccination programs progressed, indicating a change in the public's perception of COVID-19 vaccines and vaccination. Furthermore, we explored the discourse based on account attributes, i.e., followers counts and tweet counts. Results show a significant pattern of discourse differences. Our findings highlight the potential of harnessing a large-scale geotagged Twitter dataset to understand global public health communication and to inform targeted interventions aimed at addressing vaccine hesitancy.

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Pardeep Singh, Rabindra Lamsal, Monika Singh, Satish Chand, Bhawna Shishodia. 2024-03-14. From Pro, Anti to Informative and Hesitant: An Infoveillance study of COVID-19 vaccines and vaccination discourse on Twitter. https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.09349

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