University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Exploring the COVID-19 Vaccine-related Opinion Shifting of Users on Twitter

Sun, Ran; An, Lu

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330_abstract.docx
330_poster.pdf

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/122818

Description

Title
Exploring the COVID-19 Vaccine-related Opinion Shifting of Users on Twitter
Author(s)
  • Sun, Ran
  • An, Lu
Issue Date
2024-03-20
Keyword(s)
  • Opinion shifting
  • Topic analysis
  • Sentiment analysis
  • Social media
  • Vaccine
Abstract
Understanding public opinion on social media is vital for developing evidence-based interventions that drive positive change in global Covid-19 vaccination efforts. This ongoing study thus addresses the public opinion shifting on Twitter through the analysis of over 200k users engaged in online discussions related to the Covid-19 vaccine. We then operationalize opinion shifting in three dimensions: word 1-grams shifting, topic shifting and sentiment shifting. Day-scale usage frequency distributions for 1-grams are compared by rank turbulence divergence and the Mann-Kendall Mutation analysis is applied to determine the discussion shift based on the divergence score per two days. Text analysis methods are employed for topic clustering and sentiment analysis on tweets. Based on analyzing users' topic shifting, we explore opinion shifting from their sentiment changes on a topic. Our findings indicate that more than half of the social media users experience vaccine-related topic shifting. Users who experience topic shifting and who focus on a single topic have slightly different patterns of sentiment shifting when they hold the same sentiment on a topic. Individuals who focus on a single topic tend to experience increased sentiment polarization toward a particular sentiment direction over time.
Publisher
iSchools
Series/Report Name or Number
iConference 2024 Proceedings
Type of Resource
Other
Genre of Resource
Conference Poster
Language
eng
Handle URL
https://hdl.handle.net/2142/122818
Copyright and License Information
Copyright 2024 is held by Ran Sun and Lu An. Copyright permissions, when appropriate, must be obtained directly from the authors.

Owning Collections

iConference 2024 Posters PRIMARY
Posters presented at the 2024 iConference https://www.ischools.org/iconference