The infinity vaccine war: linguistic regularities and audience engagement of vaccine debate on Twitter
ISSN: 1468-4527
Article publication date: 1 May 2023
Issue publication date: 15 January 2024
Abstract
Purpose
As public health professionals strive to promote vaccines for inoculation efforts, fervent anti-vaccination movements are marshaling against it. This study is motived by a need to better understand the online discussion around vaccination. The authors identified the sentiments, emotions and topics of pro- and anti-vaxxers’ tweets, investigated their change since the pandemic started and further examined the associations between these content features and audiences’ engagement.
Design/methodology/approach
Utilizing a snowball sampling method, data were collected from the Twitter accounts of 100 pro-vaxxers (266,680 tweets) and 100 anti-vaxxers (248,425 tweets). The authors are adopting a zero-shot machine learning algorithm with a pre-trained transformer-based model for sentiment analysis and structural topic modeling to extract the topics. And the authors use the hurdle negative binomial model to test the relationships among sentiment/emotion, topics and engagement.
Findings
In general, pro-vaxxers used more positive tones and more emotions of joy in their tweets, while anti-vaxxers utilized more negative terms. The cues of sadness predominantly encourage retweets across the pro- and anti-vaccine corpus, while tweets amplifying the emotion of surprise are more attention-grabbing and getting more likes. Topic modeling of tweets yields the top 15 topics for pro- and anti-vaxxers separately. Among the pro-vaxxers’ tweets, the topics of “Child protection” and “COVID-19 situation” are positively predicting audiences’ engagement. For anti-vaxxers, the topics of “Supporting Trump,” “Injured children,” “COVID-19 situation,” “Media propaganda” and “Community building” are more appealing to audiences.
Originality/value
This study utilizes social media data and a state-of-art machine learning algorithm to generate insights into the development of emotionally appealing content and effective vaccine promotion strategies while combating coronavirus disease 2019 and moving toward a global recovery.
Peer review
The peer review history for this article is available at https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-03-2022-0186
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors thank the editor and the reviewers for their thoughtful comments and suggestions, which have greatly contributed to the improvement of the quality of the manuscript.
Citation
Peng, R.X. and Wang, R.Y. (2024), "The infinity vaccine war: linguistic regularities and audience engagement of vaccine debate on Twitter", Online Information Review, Vol. 48 No. 1, pp. 84-104. https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-03-2022-0186
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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