Public Perception of COVID-19 Vaccines on Twitter in the United States

Xie, Z.; Wang, X.; Jiang, Y.; Chen, Y.; Huang, S.; Ma, H.; Anand, A.; Li, D.

Background: COVID-19 vaccines play a vital role in combating the COVID-19 pandemic. Social media provides a rich data source to study public perception of COVID-19 vaccines. Objective: In this study, we aimed to examine public perception and discussion of COVID-19 vaccines on Twitter in the US, as well as geographic and demographic characteristics of Twitter users who discussed about COVID-19 vaccines. Methods: Through Twitter streaming Application Programming Interface (API), COVID-19-related tweets were collected from March 5th, 2020 to January 25th, 2021 using relevant keywords (such as "corona", "covid19", and "covid"). Based on geolocation information provided in tweets and vaccine-related keywords (such as "vaccine" and "vaccination"), we identified COVID-19 vaccine-related tweets from the US. Topic modeling and sentiment analysis were performed to examine public perception and discussion of COVID-19 vaccines. Demographic inference using computer vision algorithm (DeepFace) was performed to infer the demographic characteristics (age, gender and race/ethnicity) of Twitter users who tweeted about COVID-19 vaccines. Results: Our longitudinal analysis showed that the discussion of COVID-19 vaccines on Twitter in the US reached a peak at the end of 2020. Average sentiment score for COVID-19 vaccine-related tweets remained relatively stable during our study period except for two big peaks, the positive peak corresponds to the optimism about the development of COVID-19 vaccines and the negative peak corresponds to worrying about the availability of COVID-19 vaccines. COVID-19 vaccine-related tweets from east coast states showed relatively high sentiment score. Twitter users from east, west and southern states of the US, as well as male users and users in age group 30-49 years, were more likely to discuss about COVID-19 vaccines on Twitter. Conclusions: Public discussion and perception of COVID-19 vaccines on Twitter were influenced by the vaccine development and the pandemic, which varied depending on the geographics and demographics of Twitter users.