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. 2022 Oct 14;19(20):13287.
doi: 10.3390/ijerph192013287.

COVID-19 Vaccines on TikTok: A Big-Data Analysis of Entangled Discourses

Shaojing Sun  1 , Zhiyuan Liu  1 , Yujia Zhai  2   3 , Fan Wang  4
Affiliations

COVID-19 Vaccines on TikTok: A Big-Data Analysis of Entangled Discourses

Shaojing Sun et al. Int J Environ Res Public Health. .

Abstract

Focusing on social media affordances and China's social/political context, the present study analyzed the digital communication practices about COVID-19 vaccines on a popular social media platform-TikTok-which is called DouYin in China. Overall, this study identified five major forces partaking in constructing the discourses, with government agencies and state media being the dominant contributors. Furthermore, video posters demonstrated different patterns of utilizing social media affordances (e.g., hashtags) in disseminating their messages. The top hashtags adopted by state media were more representative of international relations and Taiwan; those by government agencies were of updates on pandemic outbreaks; those by individual accounts were of mainstream values and health education; those by commercial media were of celebrities and health education; those by enterprise accounts were of TikTok built-in marketing hashtags. The posted videos elicited both cognitive and affective feedback from online viewers. Implications of the findings were discussed in the context of health communication and global recovery against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic and Chinese culture.

Keywords: China; TikTok; big data; health communication; social media; vaccine.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
The procedure of data processing.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Hashtag co-occurrence network by account types.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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