Harnessing Twitter data to survey public attention and attitudes towards COVID-19 vaccines in the UK

Seena Fazel,Babak Javid,Isabell Brikell,Le Zhang,Zheng Chang

doi:10.1038/s41598-021-02710-4

Abstract

Attitudes to COVID-19 vaccination vary considerably within and between countries. Although the contribution of socio-demographic factors to these attitudes has been studied, the role of social media and how it interacts with news about vaccine development and efficacy is uncertain. We examined around 2 million tweets from 522,893 persons in the UK from November 2020 to January 2021 to evaluate links between Twitter content about vaccines and major scientific news announcements about vaccines. The proportion of tweets with negative vaccine content varied, with reductions of 20–24% on the same day as major news announcement. However, the proportion of negative tweets reverted back to an average of around 40% within a few days. Engagement rates were higher for negative tweets. Public health messaging could consider the dynamics of Twitter-related traffic and the potential contribution of more targeted social media campaigns to address vaccine hesitancy.

Highlights

Attitudes to COVID-19 vaccination vary considerably within and between countries
Vaccine hesitancy is not a new phenomenon, but as the use of social media platforms grows globally, barriers to the spread of anti-vaccination attitudes and misinformation have been removed. This is of potential concern, as social media has taken a significant role in the public discourse about COVID-19, with the World Health Organization (WHO) warning of an online ‘infodemic’ relating to COVID-193
Prior research indicates that individuals who rely on social media for information regarding the pandemic are more likely to be vaccine hesitant[3,4], and that anti-vaccine content is prevalent across social media platforms, posted by a minority of users, but frequently generates greater user engagement than neutral or pro-vaccine social media posts[5,6,7]

Summary

Introduction

Attitudes to COVID-19 vaccination vary considerably within and between countries. the contribution of socio-demographic factors to these attitudes has been studied, the role of social media and how it interacts with news about vaccine development and efficacy is uncertain. Vaccine hesitancy is not a new phenomenon, but as the use of social media platforms grows globally, barriers to the spread of anti-vaccination attitudes and misinformation have been removed This is of potential concern, as social media has taken a significant role in the public discourse about COVID-19, with the World Health Organization (WHO) warning of an online ‘infodemic’ relating to COVID-193. Vaccination programs have been moving from elderly and other high-risk groups to young and middle-aged adults and adolescents in many countries As these younger age groups are those who most frequently use social media, real-time social media data can provide important information about trends in public attitudes and sentiment in response to news reports and public health interventions encouraging vaccine uptake[11]. We examined social media attention and attitudes to COVID-19 vaccine using Twitter posts in the UK

Methods

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Conclusion