GeoCovaxTweets: COVID-19 Vaccines and Vaccination-specific Global Geotagged Twitter Conversations

TL;DR

This paper introduces GeoCovaxTweets, a comprehensive global dataset of over 1.8 million geotagged tweets about COVID-19 vaccines, enabling analysis of social media discourse and misinformation across different regions and times.

Contribution

The paper presents a new large-scale, geotagged Twitter dataset focused on COVID-19 vaccines, including its curation process and potential applications for crisis computing research.

Findings

Dataset covers 233 countries and territories from Jan 2020 to Nov 2022.

Enables analysis of spatial and temporal trends in vaccine discourse.

Supports research on misinformation and anti-vaccination campaigns.

Abstract

Social media platforms provide actionable information during crises and pandemic outbreaks. The COVID-19 pandemic has imposed a chronic public health crisis worldwide, with experts considering vaccines as the ultimate prevention to achieve herd immunity against the virus. A proportion of people may turn to social media platforms to oppose vaccines and vaccination, hindering government efforts to eradicate the virus. This paper presents the COVID-19 vaccines and vaccination-specific global geotagged tweets dataset, GeoCovaxTweets, that contains more than 1.8 million tweets, with location information and longer temporal coverage, originating from 233 countries and territories between January 2020 and November 2022. The paper discusses the dataset's curation method and how it can be re-created locally, and later explores the dataset through multiple tweets distributions and briefly discusses its potential use cases. We anticipate that the dataset will assist the researchers in the crisis computing domain to explore the conversational dynamics of COVID-19 vaccines and vaccination Twitter discourse through numerous spatial and temporal dimensions concerning trends, shifts in opinions, misinformation, and anti-vaccination campaigns.