Examining the Utility of Social Media in COVID-19 Vaccination: Unsupervised Learning of 672,133 Twitter Posts.

Liew, Tau Ming; Lee, Cia Sin

BACKGROUND Although COVID-19 vaccines have recently become available, efforts in global mass vaccination can be hampered by the widespread issue of vaccine hesitancy. OBJECTIVE This study utilized social media data to capture close-to-real-time public perspectives and sentiments on COVID-19 vaccine, with the intention to understand the key issues that have captured public attention, as well as the barriers and facilitators to successful COVID-19 vaccination. METHODS Twitter was searched for tweets related to 'COVID-19' and 'vaccine', over an eleven-week period after 18th November 2020 (following press release on the first effective vaccine). An unsupervised machine-learning approach (Structural Topic Modelling) was used to identify topics from tweets, with each topic further grouped into themes using manually conducted thematic analysis as well as guided by the theoretical framework of COM-B Model (Capability, Opportunity, Motivation, Behaviour). Sentiment analysis of the tweets was also performed, using a rule-based machine-learning model (VADER). RESULTS Tweets related to COVID-19 vaccine were posted by individuals around the world (n=672133). Six overarching themes could be identified: (i) Emotional reactions related to COVID-19 vaccine (19.3%); (ii) Public concerns related to COVID-19 vaccine (19.6%); (iii) Discussions on news related to COVID-19 vaccine (13.3%); (iv) Public health communications on COVID-19 vaccine (10.3%); (v) Discussions on approach to COVID-19 vaccination drive (17.1%); and (vi) Discussions on distribution of COVID-19 vaccine (20.3%). Tweets with negative sentiment largely fell within the themes of Emotional reactions and Public concerns. Tweets related to facilitators of vaccination showed temporal variations over time, while tweets related to barriers remained largely constant throughout the study period. CONCLUSIONS The findings may facilitate the formulation of comprehensive strategies to improve COVID-19 vaccine uptake - they highlight the key processes that require attention in the planning of COVID-19 vaccination, as well as provide feedbacks on evolving barriers and facilitators in ongoing vaccination drives to allow further policy tweaks. The findings also illustrate 3 key roles of social media in COVID-19 vaccination - for surveillance and monitoring, as a communication platform, and for evaluation of government responses. CLINICALTRIAL Not applicable.