Understanding Reactions to Covid-19 Vaccines on Twitter: A Gendered Perspective

Digital technology and social media have transformed the way we communicate. The advent of the Covid-19 pandemic has further quadrupled the use of social media platforms especially Twitter to share opinions, sentiments, and garner information. The situation surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic is rapidly evolving ranging from preventive measures taken by health authorities, government policies, and negative psychological reactions like fear and so on. Accordingly, real-time monitoring and assessment of Twitter discussions and concerns could provide useful data for public health emergency responses and planning. Vaccine-related concerns and sentiments may influence public trust in the vaccines and subsequently lead to vaccine hesitance (Xue, 2020).There is a lot of disinformation and conspiracies surrounding the Covid-19 vaccines. The theories about vaccines having microchips in them, depopulation, the vaccine causing the new mutant virus, causing infertility or zombifying people appear to surround the vaccines. Through word frequency, sentiment, and topic modeling analysis this paper sought to understand the response of the public toward the Covid-19 vaccines. The examination of tweets found that female Twitter users have a slightly more positive sentiments and emotions towards the vaccines compared to males. Both males and females used various hashtags in support or opposition to the vaccine, and on average, males used more anti-vaccine hashtags than females. Topic modeling through unsupervised machine learning showed that both males and females talked about similar topics but differed in the degree of frequency and perspectives.