Mining Trends of COVID-19 Vaccine Beliefs on Twitter With Lexical Embeddings: Longitudinal Observational Study

Abstract

Background Social media plays a pivotal role in disseminating news globally and acts as a platform for people to express their opinions on various topics. A wide variety of views accompany COVID-19 vaccination drives across the globe, often colored by emotions that change along with rising cases, approval of vaccines, and multiple factors discussed online. Objective This study aims to analyze the temporal evolution of different emotions and the related influencing factors in tweets belonging to 5 countries with vital vaccine rollout programs, namely India, the United States, Brazil, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Methods We extracted a corpus of nearly 1.8 million Twitter posts related to COVID-19 vaccination and created 2 classes of lexical categories—emotions and influencing factors. Using cosine distance from selected seed words’ embeddings, we expanded the vocabulary of each category and tracked the longitudinal change in their strength from June 2020 to April 2021 in each country. Community detection algorithms were used to find modules in positive correlation networks. Results Our findings indicated the varying relationship among emotions and influencing factors across countries. Tweets expressing hesitancy toward vaccines represented the highest mentions of health-related effects in all countries, which reduced from 41% to 39% in India. We also observed a significant change (P<.001) in the linear trends of categories like hesitation and contentment before and after approval of vaccines. After the vaccine approval, 42% of tweets coming from India and 45% of tweets from the United States represented the “vaccine_rollout” category. Negative emotions like rage and sorrow gained the highest importance in the alluvial diagram and formed a significant module with all the influencing factors in April 2021, when India observed the second wave of COVID-19 cases. Conclusions By extracting and visualizing these tweets, we propose that such a framework may help guide the design of effective vaccine campaigns and be used by policy makers to model vaccine uptake and targeted interventions.