Understanding COVID-19 Vaccine Reaction through Comparative Analysis on Twitter

Understand

Although multiple COVID-19 vaccines have been available for several months now, vaccine hesitancy continues to be at high levels in the United States.

• In part, the issue has also become politicized, especially since the presidential election in November.
• Understanding vaccine hesitancy during this period in the context of social media, including Twitter, can provide valuable guidance both to computational social scientists and policy makers.
• Rather than studying a single Twitter corpus, this paper takes a novel view of the problem by comparatively studying two Twitter datasets collected between two different time periods (one before the election, and the other, a few months after) using the same, carefully controlled data collection and filtering methodology.