How News Agencies’ Twitter Posts on COVID-19 Vaccines Attract Audiences’ Twitter Engagement: A Content Analysis

Abstract

As the most important global news distributors, the big three international news agencies’ reports about COVID-19 vaccines have a great influence on people’s understanding of them. Based on the health belief model (HBM), we examined which constructs in the HBM were related to audiences’ Twitter engagement and the differences among the agencies. We content-analyzed 1162 COVID-19 vaccine-related tweets from three international news agencies’ Twitter accounts (@AFPespanol, @AP, @Reuters) from 2 December 2020 to 31 January 2021. The results showed that the most-used HBM construct was barriers, followed by benefits, susceptibility, cues to action, severity, and self-efficacy. About half of the tweets used a positive tone and nearly half of the tweets used a neutral tone, while only 3.1% of the tweets used a negative tone. Reuters used a significantly more negative tone, more neutral tone, and less positive tone than was expected. AFP used a significantly more positive tone and less neutral tone than was expected. The effectiveness of utilizing HBM constructs for vaccination promotion strongly depends on the audience context. The use of HBM constructs for vaccination was generally effective for Reuters but seems to have backfired for AFP.

Exploring Public Discussions Regarding COVID-19 Vaccinations on Microblogs in China: Findings from Machine Learning Algorithms

“…Sentiment analysis, as a machine learning technique, is used to detect the positive, negative, or neutral sentiments expressed in a text [ 22 ]. It is typically used to analyze the content of web-based texts [ 11 , 16 , 17 ], and has been increasingly popular in the field of public health and preventive medicine [ 23 , 24 , 25 , 26 , 27 ]. Thus far, there are several sentiment dictionaries such as the English NRC sentiment dictionary and Chinese Emotional Vocabulary Ontology Database of the Dalian University of Technology that have been widely used to uncover sentiments expressed in web texts [ 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 ].…”

“…Social media such as Twitter, Sina Weibo and Facebook/Meta are platforms for free expression [ 10 , 11 , 12 ] and can provide extensive and valuable information to explore users’ awareness and sentiments on major public health events such as COVID-19 vaccinations [ 13 , 14 ]. Moreover, the analysis of social media data has become one of the most important fields of focus in medical informatics research.…”

Futile or fertile? The effect of persuasive strategies on citizen engagement in COVID-19 vaccine-related tweets across six national health departments

“…Though most of the above studies examined whether the HBM constructs were presented in social media content, only a few studies examined the effect of the presence of these HBM constructs on citizen engagement ( Guidry et al, 2020 ; Wang and Lu, 2022 ). These limited studies suggest a critical application challenge: while the HBM has been tested extensively in the health behavior literature, its effectiveness may vary in different practical scenarios when it is applied in social media persuasion contexts.…”

“…These limited studies suggest a critical application challenge: while the HBM has been tested extensively in the health behavior literature, its effectiveness may vary in different practical scenarios when it is applied in social media persuasion contexts. For example, Wang and Lu (2022) found that the impacts of HBM constructs on citizens’ Twitter engagement were not stable and varied among the three big news agencies. Vaccination promotion using HBM constructs was effective for Reuters but seemed to be counterproductive for AFP.…”

“…Furthermore, the COVID-19 vaccine acceptance rates also varied greatly, with 82.3% for South Korea, 78% for India, 81.2% for the UK, 73.7% for Germany, and 66.6% for the United States in June 2021 ( Lazarus et al, 2022 ). Studies have suggested that while HBM constructs have a positive effect on citizen engagement for regions with high vaccine acceptance rates, they have a detrimental effect on citizen engagement for regions that possess low vaccine acceptance rates ( Wang and Lu, 2022 ). Accordingly, we predict that persuasion effects will be different for countries with different vaccine acceptance rates.…”