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

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 cou...

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Published inVaccines (Basel) Vol. 11; no. 4; p. 817
Main Authors Lokmanoglu, Ayse D, Nisbet, Erik C, Osborne, Matthew T, Tien, Joseph, Malloy, Sam, Cueva Chacón, Lourdes, Villa Turek, Esteban, Abhari, Rod
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Switzerland MDPI AG 01.04.2023
MDPI
Subjects
Attitudes
Autoregressive models
COVID-19
COVID-19 vaccines
Decision making
Decision theory
Digital media
Emotions
Forecasts and trends
Health aspects
Health behavior
Immunization
Influence
Peru
Risk taking
sentiment analysis
social amplification of risk framework
Social media
Social networks
Surveys
vaccine acceptance
Vaccines
Peru
COVID-19
vaccine acceptance
sentiment analysis
Peru
social media
social amplification of risk framework
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Summary: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.
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ISSN:2076-393X
2076-393X
DOI:10.3390/vaccines11040817