Sentiments in the Online Anti- and Pro-Vaccination Discourse on Twitter
Summary
Vaccine hesitancy, which is a term to describe that
people have doubts about vaccination and choose to
delay or refuse vaccine uptake even though vaccines are
readily available, is one of the greatest threats to global
health. To effectively promote vaccine uptake and to
tackle vaccine hesitancy it is important to gain insight
into the vaccination discourse to get a better
understanding of why people refuse vaccination. This
study aims to examine the sentiments that are expressed
in the online vaccination discourse and to research the
differences in sentiments between the pro-vaccination
majority and the anti-vaccination movement. Dutchlanguage vaccination-related messages were collected
from Twitter ranging from January 2012 until June 2019
and categorised which resulted in 57 anti-vaccination
tweets and 354 pro-vaccination tweets. A sentiment
analysis and qualitative content analysis was conducted.
Both anti- and pro-vaccination tweets contained strong
subjectivity and polarity scores, thus tweets on both
sides of the discourse were strong in sentiment and no
meaningful difference was found. Anti- and provaccination adherents both used more negative feelings
than positive feeling words in their tweets. The
sentiments in both anti- and pro-vaccination tweets
related to a strong sense of in-group identity. Sentiments
expressed in tweets posted by anti-vaccination adherents
related to the presence of reactance. These findings
increase insight into the relevance of social identity and
reactance in the decision-making of anti-vaccination
adherents and suggest that more attention should be
paid to the vaccination discourse on social media
platforms such as Twitter. More insight into the online
vaccination discourse could improve the understanding of
how vaccine hesitancy develops and spreads which is
needed to effectively counter vaccine hesitancy