Social Media Sentiment about COVID-19 Vaccination Predicts Vaccine Acceptance among Peruvian Social Media Users the Next Day

Ayse D. Lokmanoglu*, Erik C. Nisbet, Matthew T. Osborne, Joseph Tien, Sam Malloy, Lourdes Cueva Chacón, Esteban Villa Turek, Rod Abhari

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

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 languageEnglish (US)
Article number817
JournalVaccines
Volume11
Issue number4
DOIs
StatePublished - Apr 2023

Keywords

  • COVID-19
  • Peru
  • sentiment analysis
  • social amplification of risk framework
  • social media
  • vaccine acceptance

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Drug Discovery
  • Infectious Diseases
  • Pharmacology (medical)
  • Pharmacology
  • Immunology

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