Abstract
During the COVID-19 pandemic, social media served as an important channel for the public to obtain health information and disseminate opinions when offline communication was severely hindered. Yet the emergence of social bots influencing social media conversations about public health threats will require researchers and practitioners to develop new communication strategies considering their influence. So far, little is known as to what extent social bots have been involved in COVID-19 vaccine-related discussions and debates on social media. This work selected a period of nearly 9 months after the approval of the first COVID-19 vaccines to detect social bots and performed high-frequency word analysis for both social bot-generated and human-generated tweets, thus working out the extent to which social bots participated in the discussion on the COVID-19 vaccine on Twitter and their participation features. Then, a textual analysis was performed on the content of tweets. The findings revealed that 8.87% of the users were social bots, with 11% of tweets in the corpus. Besides, social bots remained active over three periods. High-frequency words in the discussions of social bots and human users on vaccine topics were similar within the three peaks of discourse.
Highlights
Academic Editor: Alice ChengAs a platform promoting public engagement and discussion, social media is an important tool for the public to receive information, make judgments, and form cognition [1].Intensive global efforts towards physical distancing and isolation to curb the spread of COVID-19 may have intensified the use of social media as individuals try to remain connected while in quarantine [2]
We selected one important time point as a timestamp for data collecting: the U.S Food and Drug Administration (FDA) officially approved the COVID-19 vaccine produced by Pfizer as the beginning of data collection on 11 December 2020, which was an important beginning for COVID-19 vaccination
Social Bots Participated in Online COVID-19 Vaccines Related Discourse
Summary
Academic Editor: Alice ChengAs a platform promoting public engagement and discussion, social media is an important tool for the public to receive information, make judgments, and form cognition [1].Intensive global efforts towards physical distancing and isolation to curb the spread of COVID-19 may have intensified the use of social media as individuals try to remain connected while in quarantine [2]. As a platform promoting public engagement and discussion, social media is an important tool for the public to receive information, make judgments, and form cognition [1]. Social media has become an important channel for the public to understand and discuss vaccine-related information, acting as a channel tool to reflect and shape public perception [3]. Social media has played a central role in disseminating scientific information and online discussion during the current pandemic [5,6]. In the earlier studies on vaccines, social bots—automated accounts controlled and manipulated by computer algorithms [7]—have been accused of participating in vaccine discussions on social media [8,9], including public sentiment manipulation [10,11]
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