Reexamining the Echo Chamber Effect of COVID-19 Vaccine Videos on YouTube

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has been going on for more than two years. Vaccination is believed to be one of the most efficient ways to achieve herd immunity and end pandemic. However, the contents about COVID-19 vaccines on social media have impacts on personal attitude towards vaccination. The present study aims to examine the current scenario and the echo chamber effect of COVID-19 vaccine videos on YouTube. A total of 1,646 videos with comments and replies were identified. An approach combining topic modeling, sentiment analysis, and social network analysis was employed to explore users’ attitude towards COVID-19 vaccines and whether the echo chamber effect existed. The results indicate that, even if the misleading and anti-vaccination videos were removed by the platform, "anti-vaccination" contents still widely appear in the comments. Moreover, the community of "anti-vaccination" users was more homogeneous compared with that of "pro-vaccination" users. The findings of this study advanced theories of echo chamber effect and the network perspective to examine echo chambers. We propose that should be paid more attention ideology echo chamber, compared with exposure echo chamber.