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Review
. 2023 Feb 8:9:20552076231155682.
doi: 10.1177/20552076231155682. eCollection 2023 Jan-Dec.

A comparison between online social media discussions and vaccination rates: A tale of four vaccines

Qingqing Chen  1 , Arie Croitoru  2 , Andrew Crooks  1
Affiliations
Review

A comparison between online social media discussions and vaccination rates: A tale of four vaccines

Qingqing Chen et al. Digit Health. .

Abstract

The recent COVID-19 pandemic has brought the debate around vaccinations to the forefront of public discussion. In this discussion, various social media platforms have a key role. While this has long been recognized, the way by which the public assigns attention to such topics remains largely unknown. Furthermore, the question of whether there is a discrepancy between people's opinions as expressed online and their actual decision to vaccinate remains open. To shed light on this issue, in this paper we examine the dynamics of online debates among four prominent vaccines (i.e., COVID-19, Influenza, MMR, and HPV) through the lens of public attention as captured on Twitter in the United States from 2015 to 2021. We then compare this to actual vaccination rates from governmental reports, which we argue serve as a proxy for real-world vaccination behaviors. Our results demonstrate that since the outbreak of COVID-19, it has come to dominate the vaccination discussion, which has led to a redistribution of attention from the other three vaccination themes. The results also show an apparent discrepancy between the online debates and the actual vaccination rates. These findings are in line with existing theories, that of agenda-setting and zero-sum theory. Furthermore, our approach could be extended to assess the public's attention toward other health-related issues, and provide a basis for quantifying the effectiveness of health promotion policies.

Keywords: COVID-19; HPV; MMR; agenda-setting; influenza; social media; vaccination.

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Conflict of interest statement

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
The workflow for comparing between online social media discussion and vaccination rates.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
The quarterly distribution of percentage of users by different vaccine discussion from 2015 to 2021.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
The comparison between different vaccine discussions on Twitter and growth rate of the actual vaccination rate collected from the CDC (a) COVID-19; (b) Influenza; (c) HPV; (d) MMR.
Figure 4.
Figure 4.
The distribution of absolute influenza vaccination rate by month recorded by the CDC (Note: there is no data available for June).
Figure 5.
Figure 5.
Distribution of different vaccine sentiments by quarter (a) COVID-19; (b) Influenza; (c) MMR; (d) HPV.
Figure 6.
Figure 6.
The changes of emotion over time for different vaccines.
Figure A1.
Figure A1.
Scaled influenza vaccination coverage by different ages.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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