How COVID-19 has Impacted the Anti-Vaccine Discourse: A Large-Scale Twitter Study Spanning Pre-COVID and Post-COVID Era
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arXiv
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| Natura: | Preprint |
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2024
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| author | Poddar, Soham Mukherjee, Rajdeep Khatuya, Subhendu Ganguly, Niloy Ghosh, Saptarshi |
| author_facet | Poddar, Soham Mukherjee, Rajdeep Khatuya, Subhendu Ganguly, Niloy Ghosh, Saptarshi |
| contents | The debate around vaccines has been going on for decades, but the COVID-19 pandemic showed how crucial it is to understand and mitigate anti-vaccine sentiments. While the pandemic may be over, it is still important to understand how the pandemic affected the anti-vaccine discourse, and whether the arguments against non-COVID vaccines (e.g., Flu, MMR, IPV, HPV vaccines) have also changed due to the pandemic. This study attempts to answer these questions through a large-scale study of anti-vaccine posts on Twitter. Almost all prior works that utilized social media to understand anti-vaccine opinions considered only the three broad stances of Anti-Vax, Pro-Vax, and Neutral. There has not been any effort to identify the specific reasons/concerns behind the anti-vax sentiments (e.g., side-effects, conspiracy theories, political reasons) on social media at scale. In this work, we propose two novel methods for classifying tweets into 11 different anti-vax concerns -- a discriminative approach (entailment-based) and a generative approach (based on instruction tuning of LLMs) -- which outperform several strong baselines. We then apply this classifier on anti-vaccine tweets posted over a 5-year period (Jan 2018 - Jan 2023) to understand how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the anti-vaccine concerns among the masses. We find that the pandemic has made the anti-vaccine discourse far more complex than in the pre-COVID times, and increased the variety of concerns being voiced. Alarmingly, we find that concerns about COVID vaccines are now being projected onto the non-COVID vaccines, thus making more people hesitant in taking vaccines in the post-COVID era. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_01669 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2024 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | How COVID-19 has Impacted the Anti-Vaccine Discourse: A Large-Scale Twitter Study Spanning Pre-COVID and Post-COVID Era Poddar, Soham Mukherjee, Rajdeep Khatuya, Subhendu Ganguly, Niloy Ghosh, Saptarshi Social and Information Networks Computers and Society Physics and Society The debate around vaccines has been going on for decades, but the COVID-19 pandemic showed how crucial it is to understand and mitigate anti-vaccine sentiments. While the pandemic may be over, it is still important to understand how the pandemic affected the anti-vaccine discourse, and whether the arguments against non-COVID vaccines (e.g., Flu, MMR, IPV, HPV vaccines) have also changed due to the pandemic. This study attempts to answer these questions through a large-scale study of anti-vaccine posts on Twitter. Almost all prior works that utilized social media to understand anti-vaccine opinions considered only the three broad stances of Anti-Vax, Pro-Vax, and Neutral. There has not been any effort to identify the specific reasons/concerns behind the anti-vax sentiments (e.g., side-effects, conspiracy theories, political reasons) on social media at scale. In this work, we propose two novel methods for classifying tweets into 11 different anti-vax concerns -- a discriminative approach (entailment-based) and a generative approach (based on instruction tuning of LLMs) -- which outperform several strong baselines. We then apply this classifier on anti-vaccine tweets posted over a 5-year period (Jan 2018 - Jan 2023) to understand how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the anti-vaccine concerns among the masses. We find that the pandemic has made the anti-vaccine discourse far more complex than in the pre-COVID times, and increased the variety of concerns being voiced. Alarmingly, we find that concerns about COVID vaccines are now being projected onto the non-COVID vaccines, thus making more people hesitant in taking vaccines in the post-COVID era. |
| title | How COVID-19 has Impacted the Anti-Vaccine Discourse: A Large-Scale Twitter Study Spanning Pre-COVID and Post-COVID Era |
| topic | Social and Information Networks Computers and Society Physics and Society |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.01669 |