Journal article
Harnessing Twitter data to survey public attention and attitudes towards COVID-19 vaccines in the UK
- Abstract:
- Attitudes to COVID-19 vaccination vary considerably within and between countries. Although the contribution of socio-demographic factors to these attitudes has been studied, the role of social media and how it interacts with news about vaccine development and efficacy is uncertain. We examined around 2 million tweets from 522,893 persons in the UK from November 2020 to January 2021 to evaluate links between Twitter content about vaccines and major scientific news announcements about vaccines. The proportion of tweets with negative vaccine content varied, with reductions of 20–24% on the same day as major news announcement. However, the proportion of negative tweets reverted back to an average of around 40% within a few days. Engagement rates were higher for negative tweets. Public health messaging could consider the dynamics of Twitter-related traffic and the potential contribution of more targeted social media campaigns to address vaccine hesitancy.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, 1.8MB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1038/s41598-021-02710-4
Authors
- Publisher:
- Springer Nature
- Journal:
- Scientific Reports More from this journal
- Volume:
- 11
- Issue:
- 1
- Article number:
- 23402
- Publication date:
- 2021-12-14
- Acceptance date:
- 2021-11-16
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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2045-2322
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
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1226072
- Local pid:
-
pubs:1226072
- Deposit date:
-
2021-12-20
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Fazel et al.
- Copyright date:
- 2021
- Rights statement:
- © The Author(s) 2021. Open Access: This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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