Investigating Covid-19 twitter sentiments during the 2021 vaccine roll-out in South Africa

Abstract

Vaccination is a vital component in the control of a pandemic like COVID-19. However, to a certain extent, COVID-19 vaccines have been met with public fear and scepticism, thereby making it difficult for communication practitioners, health authorities and health experts to communicate science-based information on the vaccines. Social media have been proven to play a significant role in the low acceptability of vaccines. The fundamental objective of this research was to investigate the sentiment of tweets and themes within those tweets on COVID-19 vaccines in South Africa, from January to May 2021. Twitter is one of the most effective platforms for monitoring vaccine sentiments with the view of informing communication campaigns of the proactive use of social media during disease outbreaks and identifying, responding to and avoiding vaccine misinformation. The results of the study hold potential interest for organisations responsible for the uptake of vaccines, such as the Department of Health, regional health organisations, like the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, global health organisations, such as the World Health Organization (WHO), and social science researchers. The study employed both qualitative and quantitative research methodologies, while Meltwater Media Intelligence was utilised to collect data. The Meltwater Media Intelligence tool was programmed to track and identify tweets concerning COVID-19 vaccines in South Africa, from January to May 2021. To acquire relevant tweets, the program browsed and indexed tweets by using machine-learning algorithms and an online Boolean searches. Tweets were extracted by using prominent hashtags, which resulted in the creation of a research string. After the data had been cleaned, the remaining tweet collection – which consisted of 20 841 original tweets and individual users’ quoted tweets – was analysed. The sentiment analysis of tweets on COVID-19 vaccines resulted in demonstrating that the majority (85%) of tweets from January 2021 to May 2021 expressed neutral emotions around COVID-19 vaccinations. Furthermore, tweets with neutral sentiments were the most prevalent during the entire period, whereas tweets with positive sentiments were the least prevalent during this period. Between February and May 2021, negative and positive attitudes were balanced. Furthermore, the thematic analysis of 150 tweets (which have been equally sampled from negative, neutral and positive tweets), between January 2021 to May 2021, on COVID-19 vaccines, revealed a total of 25 topics, which were grouped into seven overarching themes. In descending order, based on the number of tweets, the vaccine delivery and roll-out theme has 37 tweets, which accounts for 24.7%. The next theme, vaccine acceptance, included 30 tweets, which accounted for 20%. The third theme, government trust, had 29 Tweets which accounted for 19.33%. Knowledge of vaccines and vaccination information theme comprised of 19 Tweets accounting for 12.67%. Vaccine hesitancy was the fifth theme with 15 tweets accounting for 10% of the overall sample. The sixth theme, vaccine efficacy and safety, totalled 12 tweets, which accounted for 8.00%. Finally, the theme economic impact gathered the least number of tweets, accounting for eight tweets to make 5.33%. This study contributes to the emerging picture of COVID-19 related sentiments on Twitter in South Africa. The study shows that Twitter sentiment and thematic analyses can be leveraged by studying the varying sentiments during the roll-out of critical health interventions such as the COVID-19 vaccine.