A Social Networks Approach to Understanding Vaccine Conversations on Twitter: Network Clusters, Sentiment, and Certainty in HPV Social Networks

Attributes and Predictors of Opinion Leaders on Twitter: COVID-19 Childhood Vaccination Campaign

Identifying attributes of the COVID-19 childhood vaccine message disseminators is beneficial to health campaign research. This study examines the We Can Do This COVID-19 childhood vaccination health campaign message disseminators on Twitter during 2021-2022. Guided by the diffusion of innovation theory and the theory of the two-step flow communication, we classify the disseminators (n=823) and examine their influence over the two-year period. A manual content analysis and social network analysis were conducted to measure the impact of disseminators on their networks through in-degree centrality assessment. Results revealed that experts in medical fields, industrial professionals, and social media influencers were the top three most common career titles disclosed in Twitter bios among individual accounts, whereas local nonprofit organizations, governments, and companies were the most common organizational accounts. Mann-Whitney U Tests indicated that in both years message disseminators with clinical medicine expertise were more influential than those who did not reveal such expertise. However, only in 2021 were campaign message disseminators with parental expertise more influential within the social network. We discuss the implications of disseminator classification as well as the significance of enhancing health campaigns by identifying who discusses them on social media.

#4Corners4Health Social Media Cancer Prevention Campaign for Emerging Adults: Protocol for a Randomized Stepped-Wedge Trial

BACKGROUND

Many emerging adults (EAs) are prone to making unhealthy choices, which increase their risk of premature cancer morbidity and mortality. In the era of social media, rigorous research on interventions to promote health behaviors for cancer risk reduction among EAs delivered over social media is limited. Cancer prevention information and recommendations may reach EAs more effectively over social media than in settings such as health care, schools, and workplaces, particularly for EAs residing in rural areas.

OBJECTIVE

This pragmatic randomized trial aims to evaluate a multirisk factor intervention using a social media campaign designed with community advisers aimed at decreasing cancer risk factors among EAs. The trial will target EAs from diverse backgrounds living in rural counties in the Four Corners states of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah.

METHODS

We will recruit a sample of EAs (n=1000) aged 18 to 26 years residing in rural counties (Rural-Urban Continuum Codes 4 to 9) in the Four Corners states from the Qualtrics' research panel and enroll them in a randomized stepped-wedge, quasi-experimental design. The inclusion criteria include English proficiency and regular social media engagement. A social media intervention will promote guideline-related goals for increased physical activity, healthy eating, and human papillomavirus vaccination and reduced nicotine product use, alcohol intake, and solar UV radiation exposure. Campaign posts will cover digital and media literacy skills, responses to misinformation, communication with family and friends, and referral to community resources. The intervention will be delivered over 12 months in Facebook private groups and will be guided by advisory groups of community stakeholders and EAs and focus groups with EAs. The EAs will complete assessments at baseline and at 12, 26, 39, 52, and 104 weeks after randomization. Assessments will measure 6 cancer risk behaviors, theoretical mediators, and participants' engagement with the social media campaign.

RESULTS

The trial is in its start-up phase. It is being led by a steering committee. Team members are working in 3 subcommittees to optimize community engagement, the social media intervention, and the measures to be used. The Stakeholder Organization Advisory Board and Emerging Adult Advisory Board were formed and provided initial input on the priority of cancer risk factors to target, social media use by EAs, and community resources available. A framework for the social media campaign with topics, format, and theoretical mediators has been created, along with protocols for campaign management.

CONCLUSIONS

Social media can be used as a platform to counter misinformation and improve reliable health information to promote health behaviors that reduce cancer risks among EAs. Because of the popularity of web-based information sources among EAs, an innovative, multirisk factor intervention using a social media campaign has the potential to reduce their cancer risk behaviors.

TRIAL REGISTRATION

ClinicalTrials.gov NCT05618158; https://classic.clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT05618158.

INTERNATIONAL REGISTERED REPORT IDENTIFIER (IRRID)

PRR1-10.2196/50392.

Misinformation, Risk Perceptions, and Intention to Seek Information About Masks: The Moderating Roles of Gender and Reflective Judgment

The current study has three main purposes: to examine 1) the impact of theory-driven corrective messages using individual vs. collective frames on information-seeking intention 2) the mediating role of risk perceptions and 3) the moderating role of reflection and gender. Our findings from a randomized experimental study and Hayes' moderated, moderated mediation model show collective frames were associated with high-risk perceptions among women, which in turn led to higher information seeking intention. The second moderator reveals that people who scored higher on reflection were more willing to seek information. Our findings have critical implications for misinformation research by demonstrating the importance of theoretically driven messages in understanding misperceptions as well as people's information seeking behavior.

Social Cognitive Theory and Willingness to Perform Recommended Health Behavior: The Moderating Role of Misperceptions

More than 6 million people have died due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In order to slow down the spread of COVID-19, health authorities have created numerous guidelines. In the current study, we use survey data from the U.S. and social cognitive theory (SCT) to examine the associations among self-efficacy, outcome expectancies, and willingness to perform recommended COVID-19 related health behavior. Considering the misinformation-filled information ecology during the pandemic, we also examine the moderating role of misperceptions in these relationships. Our findings show that in general the SCT hypotheses hold for COVID-19 related behavior willingness. The interaction effects with COVID-19 misperceptions show that self-efficacy is not enough to understand people's health behavior. Higher outcome expectancies are important and may be able to overcome even if people held high misperceptions. Our findings have direct implications for communication theory and for health organizations in the contemporary information ecology.

Trust Matters: The Effects of Social Media Use on the Public's Health Policy Support Through (mis)beliefs in the Context of HPV Vaccination

This study examines whether social media exposure is associated with the public's beliefs and misbeliefs about human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination and how those (mis)beliefs are associated with the public's support for HPV vaccination-related policies. This study also explores whether trust in HPV vaccination-related regulatory organizations moderates the associations between social media exposure and public policy support through (mis)beliefs. We found that social media exposure was positively associated with misbeliefs about HPV vaccination. The findings also indicated that while beliefs about benefits were positively associated with policy support for HPV vaccination, misbeliefs were negatively associated with this support. More interestingly, our analysis revealed that the negative association of HPV-related misbeliefs with vaccination policy support was larger for those who had low levels of trust, compared to their high-trust counterparts.

Trust Associated with South Korean Sojourners' Chinese COVID-19 Vaccination Intent and Concerns: A Qualitative Study

People's willingness to get vaccinated determines whether the campaigns against the COVID-19 pandemic can be successful in part. Considering the fact that both foreigners and its nationals are exposed to the risk of infection in China, the Chinese government has taken measures favorable to foreigners in terms of the vaccination, yet South Korean sojourners were reluctant to get China-developed COVID-19 vaccines. This study employed the trust in institutions and trust in media as a theoretical framework and seeks to analyze how these two affect South Korean sojourners' intention to get Chinese COVID-19 vaccines. 25 South Korean sojourners living in Beijing participated in semi-structured interviews. The results showed that the mistrust South Korean sojourners have in China's institutions and media, both traditional and social media, led to their reluctance to get Chinese COVID-19 vaccines. In addition, South Korean sojourners' higher interpersonal trust in their peers also influenced their willingness to get vaccines. This study further interpreted such results from the perspective of cultural traits and national properties.

How does social presence influence public crisis information sharing intention? Situational pressure perspective

Objective

Public crises seriously affect social stability and personal health. When individuals are in a public crisis environment, they will have the impulse and intention to share information, which is a behavioral attitude shown in the face of a crisis. Public crisis information sharing intention will be affected by many factors. This study aims to examine how the process of social presence may influence information sharing intentions during a public crisis and the mediating effects of situational pressure, including risk perception of disease infection and consistency of perception of opinion climate.

Methods

This was a cross-sectional study with 505 youth SNS users. In order to collect as suitable samples as possible, a research website was commissioned to conduct a questionnaire in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in China. This questionnaire was utilized to measure social presence, risk perception of disease infection, consistency of perception of opinion climate and intention to share information about COVID-19. Structural equation modeling was used to examine variable relationships in the research model.

Results

The results showed that social presence was significantly and positively associated with risk perception of disease infection (B = 0.42, p < 0.001), consistency of perception of opinion climate (B = 0.43, p < 0.001) and intention to share information about COVID-19 (B = 0.48, p < 0.001). Risk perception of disease infection (B = 0.19, p < 0.001) and consistency of perception of opinion climate (B = 0.18, p = 0.002) positively predicted youth SNS users' intention to share information about COVID-19. Risk perception of disease infection and consistency of perception of opinion climate mediated the relationship between social presence and intention to share information about COVID-19 (Z = 2.66, CI: 0.03, 0.15; Z = 2.66, CI: 0.02, 0.16).

Conclusion

The study further deepens our understanding of the mechanisms underlying social presence and information sharing intentions. These new findings suggest that some situational cues, including media environment factors (social presence) and perceived stress factors (risk perception of disease infection, consistency of perception of opinion climate) may influence information sharing intention. From the perspective of communication psychology, this study enriched the assessment of information sharing on social media and contributes to understanding of social presence and situation pressure, and it helps to provide specific references for effectively promoting netizens' intention to share information about public crises.

Russian Troll Vaccine Misinformation Dissemination on Twitter: The Role of Political Partisanship

Although vaccine misinformation has been a longstanding problem, the growth of social media and divides based on political ideology have raised novel concerns. One noteworthy example involves the Russian Internet Research Agency's deployment of operatives on Twitter (i.e., trolls) working to sow discord among the American public. We examine 1,959 tweets made by trolls between 2015 and 2017 about vaccination to better understand their efforts to spread vaccine misinformation. Our results indicate that misinformation was more likely to be perpetuated by left and right trolls than nonpartisan trolls. There was, however, relatively little user engagement with vaccine tweets containing misinformation and no differences in engagement with misinformation shared by partisan and nonpartisan trolls. Trends in the psycholinguistic properties of language in trolls' vaccine tweets suggest that right and left trolls were more likely to include cognitive process words (i.e., insight, causation, discrepancy, certainty, differentiation, and tentativeness) than were nonpartisan trolls.

HPV vaccine narratives on Twitter during the COVID-19 pandemic: a social network, thematic, and sentiment analysis

INTRODUCTION

The COVID-19 pandemic has increased online interactions and the spread of misinformation. Some researchers anticipate benefits stemming from improved public awareness of the value of vaccines while others worry concerns around vaccine development and public health mandates may have damaged public trust. There is a need to understand whether the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccine development, and vaccine mandates have influenced HPV vaccine attitudes and sentiments to inform health communication strategies.

METHODS

We collected 596,987 global English-language tweets from January 2019-May 2021 using Twitter's Academic Research Product track. We determined vaccine confident and hesitant networks discussing HPV immunization using social network analysis. Then, we used a neural network approach to natural language processing to measure narratives and sentiment pertaining to HPV immunization.

RESULTS

Most of the tweets in the vaccine hesitant network were negative in tone (54.9%) and focused on safety concerns surrounding the HPV vaccine while most of the tweets in the vaccine confident network were neutral (51.6%) and emphasized the health benefits of vaccination. Growth in negative sentiment among the vaccine hesitant network corresponded with legislative efforts in the State of New York to mandate HPV vaccination for public school students in 2019 and the WHO declaration of COVID-19 as a Global Health Emergency in 2020. In the vaccine confident network, the number of tweets concerning the HPV vaccine decreased during the COVID-19 pandemic but in both vaccine hesitant and confident networks, the sentiments, and themes of tweets about HPV vaccine were unchanged.

CONCLUSIONS

Although we did not observe a difference in narratives or sentiments surrounding the HPV vaccine during the COVID-19 pandemic, we observed a decreased focus on the HPV vaccine among vaccine confident groups. As routine vaccine catch-up programs restart, there is a need to invest in health communication online to raise awareness about the benefits and safety of the HPV vaccine.

Cross-platform spread: vaccine-related content, sources, and conspiracy theories in YouTube videos shared in early Twitter COVID-19 conversations

High uptake of vaccinations is essential in fighting infectious diseases, including severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) that causes the ongoing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Social media play a crucial role in propagating misinformation about vaccination, including through conspiracy theories and can negatively impact trust in vaccination. Users typically engage with multiple social media platforms; however, little is known about the role and content of cross-platform use in spreading vaccination-related information. This study examined the content and dynamics of YouTube videos shared in vaccine-related tweets posted to COVID-19 conversations before the COVID-19 vaccine rollout. We screened approximately 144 million tweets posted to COVID-19 conversations and identified 930,539 unique tweets in English that discussed vaccinations posted between 1 February and 23 June 2020. We then identified links to 2,097 unique YouTube videos that were tweeted. Analysis of the video transcripts using Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic modeling and independent coders indicate the dominance of conspiracy theories. Following the World Health Organization's declaration of the COVID-19 outbreak as a public health emergency of international concern, anti-vaccination frames rapidly transitioned from claiming that vaccines cause autism to pandemic conspiracy theories, often featuring Bill Gates. Content analysis of the 20 most tweeted videos revealed that the majority (n = 15) opposed vaccination and included conspiracy theories. Their spread on Twitter was consistent with spamming and coordinated efforts. These findings show the role of cross-platform sharing of YouTube videos over Twitter as a strategy to propagate primarily anti-vaccination messages. Future policies and interventions should consider how to counteract misinformation spread via such cross-platform activities.

Examining Vaccine Sentiment on Twitter and Local Vaccine Deployment during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Understanding local public attitudes toward receiving vaccines is vital to successful vaccine campaigns. Social media platforms may help uncover vaccine sentiments during infectious disease outbreaks at the local level, and whether offline local events support vaccine-promotion efforts. Communication Infrastructure Theory (CIT) served as a guiding framework for this case study of the San Diego region examining local public sentiment toward vaccines expressed on Twitter during the COVID-19 pandemic. We performed a sentiment analysis (including positivity and subjectivity) of 187,349 tweets gathered from May 2020 to March 2021, and examined how sentiment corresponded with local vaccine deployment. The months of November and December (52.9%) 2020 saw a majority of tweets expressing positive sentiment and coincided with announcements of offline local events signaling San Diego's imminent deployment of COVID-19 vaccines. Across all months, tweets remained mostly objective (never falling below 63%). In terms of CIT, considering multiple levels of the Story Telling Network in online spaces, and examining sentiment about vaccines on Twitter may help scholars to explore the Communication Action Context, as well as cultivate positive community attitudes to improve the Field of Health Action regarding vaccines. Real-time analysis of local tweets during development and deployment of new vaccines may help monitor local public responses and guide promotion of immunizations in communities.

Public attitudes on social media toward vaccination before and during the COVID-19 pandemic

With the success of COVID-19 vaccines in clinical trials, vaccination programs are being administered for the population with the hopes of herd immunity. However, the success of any vaccination program depends on the percentage of people willing to get vaccination which is influenced by social, economic, demographic, and vaccine-specific factors. Thus, it is important to understand public attitudes and perceptions toward vaccination. This study aims to measure public attitude toward vaccines and vaccinations before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, using public data from Twitter. A total of 880,586 tweets for 57,529 unique users were included in the study. Most of the tweets were posted in five languages: French, English, Swedish, Dutch, and Italian. These tweets were divided into two time periods: before COVID-19 (T1) and during COVID-19 (T2). This study observed the shift in the sentiments of the public attitude toward vaccines before and during COVID-19 pandemic. Both positive and negative shifts in sentiments were observed for the users of various languages but shifts toward positive sentiments were more prominent during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Masks do not work”: COVID-19 misperceptions and theory-driven corrective strategies on Facebook

Purpose

One of the most prolific areas of misinformation research is examining corrective strategies in messaging. The main purposes of the current study are to examine the effects of (1) partisan media (2) credibility perceptions and emotional reactions and (3) theory driven corrective messages on people's misperceptions about COVID-19 mask wearing behaviors.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors used a randomized experimental design to test the hypotheses. The data were collected via the survey firm Lucid. The number of participants was 485. The study was conducted using Qualtrics after the research project was exempt by the Institutional Research Board of a large University in the US. The authors conducted an online experiment with four conditions, narrative versus statistics and individual versus collective. The manipulation messages were constructed as screenshots from Facebook.

Findings

The findings of this study show that higher exposure to liberal media was associated with lower misperceptions, whereas higher credibility perceptions of and positive reactions toward the misinformation post and negative emotions toward the correction comment were associated with higher misperceptions. Moreover, the findings showed that participants in the narrative and collective-frame condition had the lowest misperceptions.

Originality/value

The authors tested theory driven misinformation corrective messages to understand the impact of these messages and multiple related variables on misperceptions about COVID-19 mask wearing. This study contributes to the existing misinformation correction literature by investigating the explanatory power of the two well-established media effects theories on misinformation correction messaging and by identifying essential individual characteristics that should be considered when evaluating how misperceptions about the COVID-19 crisis works and gets reduced.

Peer review

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-11-2021-0600

Opinion leaders and Structural Hole Spanners Influencing Echo Chambers in Discussion about COVID-19 Vaccines on Social Media in China: Network Analysis (Preprint)

Background

Social media provide an ideal medium for breeding and reinforcing vaccine hesitancy, especially during public health emergencies. Algorithmic recommendation–based technology along with users’ selective exposure and group pressure lead to online echo chambers, causing inefficiency in vaccination promotion. Avoiding or breaking echo chambers largely relies on key users’ behavior.

Objective

With the ultimate goal of eliminating the impact of echo chambers related to vaccine hesitancy on social media during public health emergencies, the aim of this study was to develop a framework to quantify the echo chamber effect in users’ topic selection and attitude contagion about COVID-19 vaccines or vaccinations; detect online opinion leaders and structural hole spanners based on network attributes; and explore the relationships of their behavior patterns and network locations, as well as the relationships of network locations and impact on topic-based and attitude-based echo chambers.

Methods

We called the Sina Weibo application programming interface to crawl tweets related to the COVID-19 vaccine or vaccination and user information on Weibo, a Chinese social media platform. Adopting social network analysis, we examined the low echo chamber effect based on topics in representational networks of information, according to attitude in communication flow networks of users under different interactive mechanisms (retweeting, commenting). Statistical and visual analyses were used to characterize behavior patterns of key users (opinion leaders, structural hole spanners), and to explore their function in avoiding or breaking topic-based and attitude-based echo chambers.

Results

Users showed a low echo chamber effect in vaccine-related topic selection and attitude interaction. For the former, the homophily was more obvious in retweeting than in commenting, whereas the opposite trend was found for the latter. Speakers, replicators, and monologists tended to be opinion leaders, whereas common users, retweeters, and networkers tended to be structural hole spanners. Both leaders and spanners tended to be “bridgers” to disseminate diverse topics and communicate with users holding cross-cutting attitudes toward COVID-19 vaccines. Moreover, users who tended to echo a single topic could bridge multiple attitudes, while users who focused on diverse topics also tended to serve as bridgers for different attitudes.

Conclusions

This study not only revealed a low echo chamber effect in vaccine hesitancy, but further elucidated the underlying reasons from the perspective of users, offering insights for research about the form, degree, and formation of echo chambers, along with depolarization, social capital, stakeholder theory, user portraits, dissemination pattern of topic, and sentiment. Therefore, this work can help to provide strategies for public health and public opinion managers to cooperate toward avoiding or correcting echo chamber chaos and effectively promoting online vaccine campaigns.

#NotHolidayButDistance Education: a study on social media use for K-12 education during the COVID-19 pandemic

Purpose

This study aims to explore Twitter posts of Turkish government agencies and the public under a specific hashtag, #NotHolidayButDistanceEducation, specifically related to online distance education during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Design/methodology/approach

This study used a thematic analysis on 22,547 original tweets posted by 6,970 users during the first month of online distance education in Turkish K-12 schools. Based on like and retweet counts, the study further explored the extent of stakeholders’ engagement with the observed themes.

Findings

The findings showed that government agencies and citizens used Twitter to provide technical and psychological support, appreciate and motivate stakeholders, demonstrate sample distance education activities, share information and offer suggestions about the ongoing online distance education. It was also observed that the hashtag has been used for expressing negative views about online distance education and for political purposes. A positive relationship was found between social media engagement and providing technical support or sharing information for online distance education.

Practical implications

This study highlights the role of social media in providing practical and emotional support to education stakeholders in times of crisis. Thus, governments can use social media to provide evidence-based psychological and physical health support to their citizens during a pandemic. Social media can serve to improve education practices in schools through the interactions between the public and policymakers.

Originality/value

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study can be considered unique because it demonstrates the civic use of social media for educational crisis management. This study highlights the influence of social media in educational policy and practice development in the contemporary era.

Understanding the “infodemic”: social media news use, homogeneous online discussion, self-perceived media literacy and misperceptions about COVID-19

Purpose

This study has three main purposes: (1) to investigate the association between social media news use and misperceptions about COVID-19; (2) to explore the mediating role of homogeneous online discussion; (3) and to understand whether the extent to which one perceives themselves as media-literate could moderate the relationship.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors conducted an online survey and collected data through Amazon Mechanical Turk. A total of 797 participants aged 18 and above completed the survey. The average age of the respondents is 38.40 years (SD = 12.31), and 41.2% were female. In terms of party identification, 30.8% were reported leaning toward Republicans; 53.7% leaned toward Democrats, and 15.4% were reported neutral.

Findings

Results from a moderated mediation model show that social media news use is positively associated with misperceptions about the COVID-19. Moreover, homogeneous online discussion was a significant mediator of the relationship between social media news use and misperceptions about COVID-19. Further, self-perceived media literacy (SPML) significantly moderated the main and indirect effects between social media news use and COVID-19 misperceptions, such that the associations became weaker among those with higher SPML.

Originality/value

Findings provide insights into the significance of online information sources, discussion network heterogeneity and media literacy education. Although there have been many studies on misinformation, prior research has not examined these relationships, which may help provide solutions to cope with misinformation.

Peer review

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-06-2021-0305

Narrative messages, information seeking and COVID-19 vaccine intention: The moderating role of perceived behavioral control

Purpose

The main purposes of the current study are to examine 1) the influence of narrative vs statistics messages on COVID-19 related information seeking and COVID-19 vaccine intention and 2) the moderating role of perceived behavioral control (PBC).

Design

Data for a between-subject randomized experiment were collected online. The manipulation messages were presented as screenshots from the CDC’s Facebook page.

Setting

The participants were recruited from Amazon MTurk.

Subjects

A total of 300 subjects participated in the study, who were 18 years and above (M = 38.40).

Measures

Intention to seek information, COVID-19 vaccine intention, and PBC.

Analysis

To test the hypotheses, we utilized Hayes’s (2014) PROCESS for SPSS (Model 1). For intention to seek information, the main effect of the message manipulation (narrative vs statistics) [b = −2.10, t (300) = −4.14, P < .001] and the interaction [b = .41, t (300) = 3.88, P < .001] were significant. For vaccine intention, the main effects of message manipulation [b = 1.64, t (300) = −2.61, P < .005] and the interaction [b = .34, t (300) = 2.64, P < .005] were significant.

Results

Our research found that narrative messages were more persuasive for both information seeking and vaccine intention. But this was true only in the case of individuals whose PBC was low.

Conclusions

Our findings have critical implications for vaccine promotion research.

Research on the Path of Network Opinion Expression in AI Environment for College Students

Network interaction has evolved into a grouping paradigm as civilization has progressed and artificial intelligence technology has advanced. This network group model has quickly extended communication space, improved communication content, and tailored to the demands of netizens. The fast growth of the network community on campus can assist students in meeting a variety of communication needs and serve as a vital platform for their studies and daily lives. It is investigated how to extract opinion material from comment text. A strategy for extracting opinion attitude words and network opinion characteristic words from a single comment text is offered at a finer level. The development of a semiautonomous domain emotion dictionary generating technique improves the accuracy of opinion and attitude word extraction. This paper proposes a window-constrained Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic model that improves the accuracy of extracting network opinion feature words and ensures that network opinion feature words and opinion attitude words are synchronized by using the location information of opinion attitude words. The two-stage opinion leader mining approach and the linear threshold model based on user roles are the subjects of model simulation tests in this study. It is demonstrated that the two-stage opinion leader mining method suggested in this study can greatly reduce the running time while properly finding opinion leaders with stronger leadership by comparing the results with existing models. It also shows that the linear threshold model based on user roles proposed in this paper can effectively limit the total number of active users who are activated multiple times during the information diffusion process by distinguishing the effects of different user roles on the information diffusion process.

"I enjoy thinking critically, and I'm in control": Examining the influences of media literacy factors on misperceptions amidst the COVID-19 infodemic

Misinformation circulation has arguably reached a peak during the COVID-19 pandemic, creating an “infodemic” that severely endangers public health and well-being. Using a moderated mediation model, a survey of 712 respondents from China reveals that social media information seeking is positively associated with COVID-19 misperceptions, while need for cognition (NFC) is negatively associated with it. Both relationships became more significant while mediating through individuals' general misperceptions. Moreover, it is found that among those with greater locus of control over media, the association between social media information seeking and COVID-19 misperceptions became more positive, while the association between NFC and COVID-19 misperceptions became more negative among those with greater media locus of control. Findings provide insights into the misperception research and have practical implications regarding infodemic management.

Content and Dynamics of Websites Shared Over Vaccine-Related Tweets in COVID-19 Conversations: Computational Analysis

BACKGROUND

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the consequent "infodemic" increased concerns about Twitter's role in advancing antivaccination messages, even before a vaccine became available to the public. New computational methods allow for analysis of cross-platform use by tracking links to websites shared over Twitter, which, in turn, can uncover some of the content and dynamics of information sources and agenda-setting processes. Such understanding can advance theory and efforts to reduce misinformation.

OBJECTIVE

Informed by agenda-setting theory, this study aimed to identify the content and temporal patterns of websites shared in vaccine-related tweets posted to COVID-19 conversations on Twitter between February and June 2020.

METHODS

We used triangulation of data analysis methods. Data mining consisted of the screening of around 5 million tweets posted to COVID-19 conversations to identify tweets that related to vaccination and including links to websites shared within these tweets. We further analyzed the content the 20 most-shared external websites using a mixed methods approach.

RESULTS

Of 841,896 vaccination-related tweets identified, 185,994 (22.1%) contained links to specific websites. A wide range of websites were shared, with the 20 most-tweeted websites constituting 14.5% (27,060/185,994) of the shared websites and typically being shared for only 2 to 3 days. Traditional media constituted the majority of these 20 websites, along with other social media and governmental sources. We identified markers of inauthentic propagation for some of these links.

CONCLUSIONS

The topic of vaccination was prevalent in tweets about COVID-19 early in the pandemic. Sharing websites was a common communication strategy, and its "bursty" pattern and inauthentic propagation strategies pose challenges for health promotion efforts. Future studies should consider cross-platform use in dissemination of health information and in counteracting misinformation.

Understanding Human Papillomavirus Vaccine Promotions and Hesitancy in Northern California Through Examining Public Facebook Pages and Groups

Human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination coverage among adolescents is lower in rural regions and remains under the 80% coverage goal by Healthy People 2030. Through both sentiment analysis and topic modeling, this research examines how local health agencies and groups in nine Northern California counties promote HPV vaccines through Facebook and how target populations react to promotion posts in comments that elucidate their sentiments and hesitancy toward HPV vaccination. In January 2021, we identified 2,105 public Facebook pages and 1,065 groups related to health within the counties and collected a total of 212 posts and 505 comments related to the HPV vaccine. The posts were published between 2010 and 2021, with the majority (83%) published after 2017. There were large variations of Facebook activities across counties. We categorized four counties with HPV vaccination initiation rates below 40% as low-coverage counties and five counties with rates above 40% as high-coverage counties. In general, low-coverage counties had fewer Facebook activities in comparison to high coverage. Results showed that, on average, comments about the HPV vaccine exhibited more positive emotion, more negative emotion, and more anger than the posts. Overall, thematic topics that emerged from posts centered around awareness and screening of HPV and cervical cancer, STI testing services, information sources, and calls to action for health services. However, comment topics did not correspond to posts and were mostly related to vaccine hesitancy, discussing vaccine risks, safety concerns, and distrust in vaccine science, citing misinformation. When comparing high- versus low-coverage counties, posts expressed similar sentiments; however, comments within high-coverage counties expressed more anger than in low-coverage counties. Comments from both high- and low-coverage counties expressed concerns with vaccine safety, risks, and injury. It is important to note that commenters exchanged information sources and tried to address misinformation themselves. Our results suggest that the promotion of HPV vaccines from public Facebook pages and groups is limited in frequency and content diversity. This illustrates problems with generalized social media vaccination promotion without community tailoring and addressing specific hesitancy concerns. Public health agencies should listen to the thoughts of targeted audiences reflected through comments and design relevant messages to address these concerns for HPV vaccination promotion.

Analyzing Social Media to Explore the Attitudes and Behaviors Following the Announcement of Successful COVID-19 Vaccine Trials: Infodemiology Study

Background

The rollout of COVID-19 vaccines has brought vaccine hesitancy to the forefront in managing this pandemic. COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy is fundamentally different from that of other vaccines due to the new technologies being used, rapid development, and widespread global distribution. Attitudes on vaccines are largely driven by online information, particularly information on social media. The first step toward influencing attitudes about immunization is understanding the current patterns of communication that characterize the immunization debate on social media platforms.

Objective

We aimed to evaluate societal attitudes, communication trends, and barriers to COVID-19 vaccine uptake through social media content analysis to inform communication strategies promoting vaccine acceptance.

Methods

Social network analysis (SNA) and unsupervised machine learning were used to characterize COVID-19 vaccine content on Twitter globally. Tweets published in English and French were collected through the Twitter application programming interface between November 19 and 26, 2020, just following the announcement of initial COVID-19 vaccine trials. SNA was used to identify social media clusters expressing mistrustful opinions on COVID-19 vaccination. Based on the SNA results, an unsupervised machine learning approach to natural language processing using a sentence-level algorithm transfer function to detect semantic textual similarity was performed in order to identify the main themes of vaccine hesitancy.

Results

The tweets (n=636,516) identified that the main themes driving the vaccine hesitancy conversation were concerns of safety, efficacy, and freedom, and mistrust in institutions (either the government or multinational corporations). A main theme was the safety and efficacy of mRNA technology and side effects. The conversation around efficacy was that vaccines were unlikely to completely rid the population of COVID-19, polymerase chain reaction testing is flawed, and there is no indication of long-term T-cell immunity for COVID-19. Nearly one-third (45,628/146,191, 31.2%) of the conversations on COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy clusters expressed concerns for freedom or mistrust of institutions (either the government or multinational corporations) and nearly a quarter (34,756/146,191, 23.8%) expressed criticism toward the government’s handling of the pandemic.

Conclusions

Social media content analysis combined with social network analysis provides insights into the themes of the vaccination conversation on Twitter. The themes of safety, efficacy, and trust in institutions will need to be considered, as targeted outreach programs and intervention strategies are deployed on Twitter to improve the uptake of COVID-19 vaccination.

COVID-19 Vaccination Attitudes and Intention: Message Framing and the Moderating Role of Perceived Vaccine Benefits

The United States is one of the hardest-hit countries by the COVID-19 pandemic and yet there is widespread hesitancy to take the vaccine. In order to address vaccine hesitancy and foster public understanding of the COVID-19 vaccine, it is necessary to strategize public health messages based on evidence. To this end, we use experimental data to examine the effects of four message frames on participants' attitudes toward the COVID-19 vaccine and their vaccine intention. The primary purposes of this paper are to examine the 1) impact of loss vs. gain frames and individual vs. collective frames and 2) role of perceived benefits on participants' attitudes toward the COVID-19 vaccine and their vaccine intention. Our findings show that participants with higher perceived benefits and exposed to the loss frame showed higher positive attitudes toward the COVID-19 vaccine and greater intention to vaccinate. Similar patterns were revealed in case of the individual frame message. Implications are discussed.

Integrating Reasoned Action Approach and Message Sidedness in the Era of Misinformation: The Case of HPV Vaccination Promotion

Building upon extant research on the reasoned action approach and message sidedness, this study investigates the persuasive effects of one-sided and two-sided social media messages on the attitude about human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination in the context of misinformation. Results of a controlled experiment (N = 251) indicated that compared to the control, one-sided messages addressing misinformation increased positive attitude about the vaccine as prior misperceptions increased. However, a backfire effect may be looming for individuals with lower prior misperceptions. Within the sidedness conditions, refutational two-sided messages were more effective in increasing cognitive attitude for individuals with lower misperceptions; whereas one-sided messages had a persuasive advantage for individuals with higher misperceptions. Theoretical and practical contributions are discussed.

Adapting and Extending a Typology to Identify Vaccine Misinformation on Twitter

Objectives. To adapt and extend an existing typology of vaccine misinformation to classify the major topics of discussion across the total vaccine discourse on Twitter.Methods. Using 1.8 million vaccine-relevant tweets compiled from 2014 to 2017, we adapted an existing typology to Twitter data, first in a manual content analysis and then using latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modeling to extract 100 topics from the data set.Results. Manual annotation identified 22% of the data set as antivaccine, of which safety concerns and conspiracies were the most common themes. Seventeen percent of content was identified as provaccine, with roughly equal proportions of vaccine promotion, criticizing antivaccine beliefs, and vaccine safety and effectiveness. Of the 100 LDA topics, 48 contained provaccine sentiment and 28 contained antivaccine sentiment, with 9 containing both.Conclusions. Our updated typology successfully combines manual annotation with machine-learning methods to estimate the distribution of vaccine arguments, with greater detail on the most distinctive topics of discussion. With this information, communication efforts can be developed to better promote vaccines and avoid amplifying antivaccine rhetoric on Twitter.

#Antivaccination on Instagram: A Computational Analysis of Hashtag Activism through Photos and Public Responses

A dramatic increase has been registered in the number of social media posts in photo form as well as in hashtag activism. Hashtags, which manifest thoughts and feelings clearly and concisely, originated on Twitter, where the length of a post is limited; their use, however, has expanded into other social media services, including Instagram. Hashtags, which make it easy to find and express support for posts of interest, have been widely used for online activism, although they have been criticized for fostering confirmation bias. Moreover, hashtag activism in photo form has been relatively understudied. This research analyzed Instagram photos with antivaccination hashtags as an example of hashtag activism through photos. In addition, we examined how the photo features were related to public response, which was manifested via engagement and comment sentiment. The results suggest that the photos which were categorized into “text” took the largest share. It was also found that the major way of claiming was to imprint key messages that persuade people not to vaccinate with remarks from professionals on photos and provide a source of supporting information in the post text with hashtags of antivaccine intention. Various photo features showed associations with engagement and comment sentiment, but the directions of correlation were usually the opposite: these results suggest that engagement and comment sentiment are separate domains that reveal different public responses.

Bots as Active News Promoters: A Digital Analysis of COVID-19 Tweets

In this study, we examined the activities of automated social media accounts or bots that tweet or retweet referencing #COVID-19 and #COVID19. From a total sample of over 50 million tweets, we used a mixed method to extract more than 185,000 messages posted by 127 bots. Our findings show that the majority of these bots tweet, retweet and mention mainstream media outlets, promote health protection and telemedicine, and disseminate breaking news on the number of casualties and deaths caused by COVID-19. We argue that some of these bots are motivated by financial incentives, while other bots actively support the survivalist movement by emphasizing the need to prepare for the pandemic and learn survival skills. We only found a few bots that showed some suspicious activity probably due to the fact that our dataset was limited to two hashtags often used by official health bodies and academic communities.