Public sentiment analysis and topic modeling regarding COVID-19 vaccines on the Reddit social media platform: A call to action for strengthening vaccine confidence
This research addresses vaccine hesitancy by providing insights for public health messaging, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to new social media data.
The study analyzed sentiment and topics in COVID-19 vaccine discussions on Reddit from December 2020 to May 2021, finding that overall sentiment was more positive than negative and remained static over time, with topics focusing on side effects rather than conspiracy theories.
The COVID-19 pandemic fueled one of the most rapid vaccine developments in history. However, misinformation spread through online social media often leads to negative vaccine sentiment and hesitancy. To investigate COVID-19 vaccine-related discussion in social media, we conducted a sentiment analysis and Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic modeling on textual data collected from 13 Reddit communities focusing on the COVID-19 vaccine from Dec 1, 2020, to May 15, 2021. Data were aggregated and analyzed by month to detect changes in any sentiment and latent topics. ty analysis suggested these communities expressed more positive sentiment than negative regarding the vaccine-related discussions and has remained static over time. Topic modeling revealed community members mainly focused on side effects rather than outlandish conspiracy theories. Covid-19 vaccine-related content from 13 subreddits show that the sentiments expressed in these communities are overall more positive than negative and have not meaningfully changed since December 2020. Keywords indicating vaccine hesitancy were detected throughout the LDA topic modeling. Public sentiment and topic modeling analysis regarding vaccines could facilitate the implementation of appropriate messaging, digital interventions, and new policies to promote vaccine confidence.