Abstract
Drawing upon theories of risk and decision making, we present a theoretical framework for how the emotional attributes of social media content influence risk behaviors. We apply our framework to understanding how COVID-19 vaccination Twitter posts influence acceptance of the vaccine in Peru, the country with the highest relative number of COVID-19 excess deaths. By employing computational methods, topic modeling, and vector autoregressive time series analysis, we show that the prominence of expressed emotions about COVID-19 vaccination in social media content is associated with the daily percentage of Peruvian social media survey respondents who are vaccine-accepting over 231 days. Our findings show that net (positive) sentiment and trust emotions expressed in tweets about COVID-19 are positively associated with vaccine acceptance among survey respondents one day after the post occurs. This study demonstrates that the emotional attributes of social media content, besides veracity or informational attributes, may influence vaccine acceptance for better or worse based on its valence.
Original language | English (US) |
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Article number | 817 |
Journal | Vaccines |
Volume | 11 |
Issue number | 4 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Apr 2023 |
Funding
This research is based upon a grant award to ECN, JT, and SM from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), via Award # 2021-20102000001 (https://www.iarpa.gov/, accessed on 23 March 2023). The funder had no role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Keywords
- COVID-19
- Peru
- sentiment analysis
- social amplification of risk framework
- social media
- vaccine acceptance
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Immunology
- Pharmacology
- Drug Discovery
- Infectious Diseases
- Pharmacology (medical)