Abstract
As the most important global news distributors, the big three international news agencies’ reports about COVID-19 vaccines have a great influence on people’s understanding of them. Based on the health belief model (HBM), we examined which constructs in the HBM were related to audiences’ Twitter engagement and the differences among the agencies. We content-analyzed 1162 COVID-19 vaccine-related tweets from three international news agencies’ Twitter accounts (@AFPespanol, @AP, @Reuters) from 2 December 2020 to 31 January 2021. The results showed that the most-used HBM construct was barriers, followed by benefits, susceptibility, cues to action, severity, and self-efficacy. About half of the tweets used a positive tone and nearly half of the tweets used a neutral tone, while only 3.1% of the tweets used a negative tone. Reuters used a significantly more negative tone, more neutral tone, and less positive tone than was expected. AFP used a significantly more positive tone and less neutral tone than was expected. The effectiveness of utilizing HBM constructs for vaccination promotion strongly depends on the audience context. The use of HBM constructs for vaccination was generally effective for Reuters but seems to have backfired for AFP.
Highlights
Since its appearance in December 2019, coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has become a global pandemic, and to date, it has not been effectively curbed
We aimed to explore how news agencies’ Twitter posts on COVID-19 vaccines attracted audiences’ Twitter engagement
We examined which constructs in the health belief model (HBM) were related to audiences’ Twitter engagement and whether there were differences among the three news agencies
Summary
Since its appearance in December 2019, coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has become a global pandemic, and to date, it has not been effectively curbed. The emergence of COVID-19 variants such as Delta and Omicron led to a new wave of COVID19 in many countries. Countries around the world implemented a series of public health and social measures, such as movement control, social distancing, and personal measures [1], people still urgently need an effective vaccine to control the pandemic. The research and development of COVID-19 vaccines have recently been the focus of worldwide attention. Russia approved its COVID-19 vaccine for the market as early as. 11 August 2020, large-scale vaccine approval began in December 2020.
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