Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2022 Jul 27;10(8):1190.
doi: 10.3390/vaccines10081190.

Attitudes toward COVID-19 Vaccination on Social Media: A Cross-Platform Analysis

Dominik Wawrzuta  1 , Justyna Klejdysz  2   3 , Mariusz Jaworski  1 , Joanna Gotlib  1 , Mariusz Panczyk  1
Affiliations

Attitudes toward COVID-19 Vaccination on Social Media: A Cross-Platform Analysis

Dominik Wawrzuta et al. Vaccines (Basel). .

Abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic, social media content analysis allowed for tracking attitudes toward newly introduced vaccines. However, current evidence is limited to single social media platforms. Our objective was to compare arguments used by anti-vaxxers in the context of COVID-19 vaccines across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok. We obtained the data set of 53,671 comments regarding COVID-19 vaccination published between August 2021 and February 2022. After that, we established categories of anti-vaccine content, manually classified comments, and compared the frequency of occurrence of the categories between social media platforms. We found that anti-vaxxers on social media use 14 categories of arguments against COVID-19 vaccines. The frequency of these categories varies across different social media platforms. The anti-vaxxers' activity on Facebook and Twitter is similar, focusing mainly on distrust of government and allegations regarding vaccination safety and effectiveness. Anti-vaxxers on TikTok mainly focus on personal freedom, while Instagram users encouraging vaccination often face criticism suggesting that vaccination is a private matter that should not be shared. Due to the differences in vaccine sentiment among users of different social media platforms, future research and educational campaigns should consider these distinctions, focusing more on the platforms popular among adolescents (i.e., Instagram and TikTok).

Keywords: COVID-19 vaccine; Facebook; Instagram; TikTok; Twitter; public health; social media; vaccine hesitancy.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Share of each category of comments by social media platform.
Figure 2
Figure 2
The matrix of cosine similarity scores of anti-vaccine comments’ distributions between social media platforms.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Similar articles

See all similar articles

Cited by

See all "Cited by" articles

References

    1. Griffith J., Marani H., Monkman H. COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy in Canada: Content Analysis of Tweets Using the Theoretical Domains Framework. J. Med. Internet Res. 2021;23:e26874. doi: 10.2196/26874. - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Wawrzuta D., Jaworski M., Gotlib J., Panczyk M. What Arguments against COVID-19 Vaccines Run on Facebook in Poland: Content Analysis of Comments. Vaccines. 2021;9:481. doi: 10.3390/vaccines9050481. - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Huangfu L., Mo Y., Zhang P., Zeng D.D., He S. COVID-19 Vaccine Tweets after Vaccine Rollout: Sentiment–Based Topic Modeling. J. Med. Internet Res. 2022;24:e31726. doi: 10.2196/31726. - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Karami A., Zhu M., Goldschmidt B., Boyajieff H.R., Najafabadi M.M. COVID-19 Vaccine and Social Media in the U.S.: Exploring Emotions and Discussions on Twitter. Vaccines. 2021;9:1059. doi: 10.3390/vaccines9101059. - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Shasha D., Bareket R., Sikron F.H., Gertel O., Tsamir J., Dvir D., Mossinson D., Heymann A.D., Zacay G. Real-world safety data for the Pfizer BNT162b2 SARS-CoV-2 vaccine: Historical cohort study. Clin. Microbiol. Infect. 2022;28:130–134. doi: 10.1016/j.cmi.2021.09.018. - DOI - PMC - PubMed

LinkOut - more resources