Spatiotemporal trends in COVID-19 vaccine sentiments on a social media platform and correlations with reported vaccine coverage.

ABSTRACT

Objective: To assess spatiotemporal trends in, and determinants of, the acceptance of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccination globally, as expressed on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter). Methods: We collected over 13 million posts on the platform regarding COVID-19 vaccination made between November 2020 and March 2022 in 90 languages. Multilingual deep learning XLM-RoBERTa models annotated all posts using an annotation framework after being fine-tuned on 8125 manually annotated, English-language posts. The annotation results were used to assess spatiotemporal trends in COVID-19 vaccine acceptance and confidence as expressed by platform users in 135 countries and territories. We identified associations between spatiotemporal trends in vaccine acceptance and country-level characteristics and public policies by using univariate and multivariate regression analysis. Findings: A greater proportion of platform users in the World Health Organization's South-East Asia, Eastern Mediterranean and Western Pacific Regions expressed vaccine acceptance than users in the rest of the world. Countries in which a greater proportion of platform users expressed vaccine acceptance had higher COVID-19 vaccine coverage rates. Trust in government was also associated with greater vaccine acceptance. Internationally, vaccine acceptance and confidence declined among platform users as (i) vaccination eligibility was extended to adolescents; (ii) vaccine supplies became sufficient; (iii) nonpharmaceutical interventions were relaxed; and (iv) global reports on adverse events following vaccination appeared. Conclusion: Social media listening could provide an effective and expeditious means of informing public health policies during pandemics, and could supplement existing public health surveillance approaches in addressing global health issues.