1000 Days of COVID-19: A Gender-Based Long-Term Investigation into Attitudes With Regards to Vaccination

Abstract

The coronavirus pandemic has undoubtedly been one of the major recent events that have affected our society at the global level. During this period, unprecedented measures have been imposed worldwide by authorities in an effort to contain the spread of the disease. These measures have led to a worldwide debate among the public, occurring not least within the forum of social media, tapping into pre-existing trends of skepticism, such as vaccine hesitancy. At the same time, it has become apparent that the pandemic affected women and men differently. With these two themes in view, the paper aims to analyze using a data-driven approach the evolution of opinions with regards to vaccination against COVID-19 throughout the entire duration of the pandemic from the point of view of gender. For this analysis, approximately 1,500,000 short user-contributed texts have been retrieved from the popular microblogging platform Twitter, posted between 30 January 2020 and 30 November 2022. Using a machine learning approach, several classifiers have been trained to identify the likely gender ( <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">female</i> or <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">male</i> ) of the author, as well as the stance of the specific post towards the COVID-19 vaccines ( <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">neutral</i> , <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">in favor</i> , or <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">against</i> ), achieving 85.69% and 93.64% weighted accuracy measures for each problem, respectively. Based on this analysis, it can be observed that most tweets exhibit a <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">neutral</i> stance, while the number of tweets <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">in favor</i> of vaccination is greater than the number of tweets opposing vaccination, with the distribution varying across time in response to specific events. The subject matter of the tweets varied more between stances than between genders, suggesting that there is no significant difference between the contents of tweets posted by females and males. We also find that while the overall engagement on Twitter with the topic of vaccination against COVID-19 is on the wane, there has been a rise in the number of <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">against</i> tweets continuing into the present.