Public Perception of SARS-CoV-2 Vaccinations on Social Media: Questionnaire and Sentiment Analysis.
Int J Environ Res Public Health
; 18(24)2021 12 10.
Article
in English
| MEDLINE | ID: covidwho-1572452
ABSTRACT
Vaccine hesitancy is an ongoing concern, presenting a major threat to global health. SARS-CoV-2 COVID-19 vaccinations are no exception as misinformation began to circulate on social media early in their development. Twitter's Application Programming Interface (API) for Python was used to collect 137,781 tweets between 1 July 2021 and 21 July 2021 using 43 search terms relating to COVID-19 vaccines. Tweets were analysed for sentiment using Microsoft Azure (a machine learning approach) and the VADER sentiment analysis model (a lexicon-based approach), where the Natural Language Processing Toolkit (NLTK) assessed whether tweets represented positive, negative or neutral opinions. The majority of tweets were found to be negative in sentiment (53,899), followed by positive (53,071) and neutral (30,811). The negative tweets displayed a higher intensity of sentiment than positive tweets. A questionnaire was distributed and analysis found that individuals with full vaccination histories were less concerned about receiving and were more likely to accept the vaccine. Overall, we determined that this sentiment-based approach is useful to establish levels of vaccine hesitancy in the general public and, alongside the questionnaire, suggests strategies to combat specific concerns and misinformation.
Keywords
Full text:
Available
Collection:
International databases
Database:
MEDLINE
Main subject:
Social Media
/
COVID-19
Type of study:
Observational study
/
Randomized controlled trials
Topics:
Vaccines
Limits:
Humans
Language:
English
Year:
2021
Document Type:
Article
Affiliation country:
Ijerph182413028
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