The Shifting Landscape of Vaccine Discourse: Insights From a Decade of Pre- to Post-COVID-19 Vaccine Posts on Social Media

TL;DR

This study analyzes a decade of social media vaccine discourse, revealing how COVID-19 shifted sentiments, trust, and skepticism in online conversations, based on a large dataset of 18.7 million posts.

Contribution

It introduces a novel, extensive dataset and applies social psychology theories to analyze the evolution of vaccine discourse before and after COVID-19.

Findings

Decrease in negative emotion words during COVID-19

Increase in trust and surprise-related words during the pandemic

Rise in negative words indicating growing vaccine skepticism

Abstract

In this work, we study English-language vaccine discourse in social media posts, specifically posts on X (formerly Twitter), in seven years before the COVID-19 outbreak (2013 to 2019) and three years after the outbreak was first reported (2020 to 2022). Drawing on theories from social cognition and the stereotype content model in Social Psychology, we analyze how English speakers talk about vaccines on social media to understand the evolving narrative around vaccines in social media posts. To do that, we first introduce a novel dataset comprising 18.7 million curated posts on vaccine discourse from 2013 to 2022. This extensive collection-filtered down from an initial 129 million posts through rigorous preprocessing-captures both pre-COVID and COVID-19 periods, offering valuable insights into the evolution of English-speaking X users' perceptions related to vaccines. Our analysis shows that the COVID-19 pandemic led to complex shifts in X users' sentiment and discourse around vaccines. We observe that negative emotion word usage decreased during the pandemic, with notable rises in usage of surprise, and trust related emotion words. Furthermore, vaccine-related language tended to use more warmth-focused words associated with trustworthiness, along with positive, competence-focused words during the early days of the pandemic, with a marked rise in negative word usage towards the end of the pandemic, possibly reflecting a growing vaccine hesitancy and skepticism.