Winds of Change: Impact of COVID-19 on Vaccine-related Opinions of Twitter users

11/20/2021
by   Soham Poddar, et al.
0

Administering COVID-19 vaccines at a societal scale has been deemed as the most appropriate way to defend against the COVID-19 pandemic. This global vaccination drive naturally fueled a possibility of Pro-Vaxxers and Anti-Vaxxers strongly expressing their supports and concerns regarding the vaccines on social media platforms. Understanding this online discourse is crucial for policy makers. This understanding is likely to impact the success of vaccination drives and might even impact the final outcome of our fight against the pandemic. The goal of this work is to improve this understanding using the lens of Twitter-discourse data. We first develop a classifier that categorizes users according to their vaccine-related stance with high precision (97 posted about vaccines in pre-COVID and COVID times. Specifically, we identify distinct topics that these users talk about, and investigate how vaccine-related discourse has changed between pre-COVID times and COVID times. Finally, for the first time, we investigate the change of vaccine-related stances in Twitter users and shed light on potential reasons for such changes in stance. Our dataset and classifier are available at https://github.com/sohampoddar26/covid-vax-stance.

READ FULL TEXT

page 7

page 8

page 11

research
07/23/2022

Vaccine Discourse on Twitter During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccines have been an importan...
research
03/16/2021

Covid-19 Discourse on Twitter: How the Topics, Sentiments, Subjectivity, and Figurative Frames Changed Over Time

The words we use to talk about the current epidemiological crisis on soc...
research
02/18/2022

Identifying the Adoption or Rejection of Misinformation Targeting COVID-19 Vaccines in Twitter Discourse

Although billions of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered, too many ...
research
06/18/2021

How COVID-19 Has Changed Crowdfunding: Evidence From GoFundMe

While the long-term effects of COVID-19 are yet to be determined, its im...
research
10/31/2021

A network-based approach to QAnon user dynamics during COVID-19 infodemic

QAnon is an umbrella conspiracy theory that encompasses a wide spectrum ...
research
04/18/2020

A Study of Knowledge Sharing related to Covid-19 Pandemic in Stack Overflow

The Covid-19 outbreak, beyond its tragic effects, has changed to an unpr...
research
05/10/2022

The Drift of #MyBodyMyChoice Discourse on Twitter

#MyBodyMyChoice is a well-known hashtag originally created to advocate f...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset