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Public Officials’ Engagement on Social Media During the Rollout of the COVID-19 Vaccine: Content Analysis of Tweets
BACKGROUND: Social media is an important way for governments to communicate with the public. This is particularly true in times of crisis, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, during which government officials played a strong role in promoting public health measures such as vaccines. OBJECTIVE: In Canada,...
Autores principales: | , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
JMIR Publications
2023
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10361259/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37315194 http://dx.doi.org/10.2196/41582 |
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author | Marani, Husayn Song, Melodie Yunju Jamieson, Margaret Roerig, Monika Allin, Sara |
author_facet | Marani, Husayn Song, Melodie Yunju Jamieson, Margaret Roerig, Monika Allin, Sara |
author_sort | Marani, Husayn |
collection | PubMed |
description | BACKGROUND: Social media is an important way for governments to communicate with the public. This is particularly true in times of crisis, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, during which government officials played a strong role in promoting public health measures such as vaccines. OBJECTIVE: In Canada, provincial COVID-19 vaccine rollout was delivered in 3 phases aligned with federal government COVID-19 vaccine guidance for priority populations. In this study, we examined how Canadian public officials used Twitter to engage with the public about vaccine rollout and how this engagement has shaped public response to vaccines across jurisdictions. METHODS: We conducted a content analysis of tweets posted between December 28, 2020, and August 31, 2021. Leveraging the social media artificial intelligence tool Brandwatch Analytics, we constructed a list of public officials in 3 jurisdictions (Ontario, Alberta, and British Columbia) organized across 6 public official types and then conducted an English and French keyword search for tweets about vaccine rollout and delivery that mentioned, retweeted, or replied to the public officials. We identified the top 30 tweets with the highest impressions in each jurisdiction in each of the 3 phases (approximately a 26-day window) of the vaccine rollout. The metrics of engagement (impressions, retweets, likes, and replies) from the top 30 tweets per phase in each jurisdiction were extracted for additional annotation. We specifically annotated sentiment toward public officials’ vaccine responses (ie, positive, negative, and neutral) in each tweet and annotated the type of social media engagement. A thematic analysis of tweets was then conducted to add nuance to extracted data characterizing sentiment and interaction type. RESULTS: Among the 6 categories of public officials, 142 prominent accounts were included from Ontario, Alberta, and British Columbia. In total, 270 tweets were included in the content analysis and 212 tweets were direct tweets by public officials. Public officials mostly used Twitter for information provision (139/212, 65.6%), followed by horizontal engagement (37/212, 17.5%), citizen engagement (24/212, 11.3%), and public service announcements (12/212, 5.7%). Information provision by government bodies (eg, provincial government and public health authorities) or municipal leaders is more prominent than tweets by other public official groups. Neutral sentiment accounted for 51.5% (139/270) of all the tweets, whereas positive sentiment was the second most common sentiment (117/270, 43.3%). In Ontario, 60% (54/90) of the tweets were positive. Negative sentiment (eg, public officials criticizing vaccine rollout) accounted for 12% (11/90) of all the tweets. CONCLUSIONS: As governments continue to promote the uptake of the COVID-19 booster doses, findings from this study are useful in informing how governments can best use social media to engage with the public to achieve democratic goals. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-10361259 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2023 |
publisher | JMIR Publications |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-103612592023-07-22 Public Officials’ Engagement on Social Media During the Rollout of the COVID-19 Vaccine: Content Analysis of Tweets Marani, Husayn Song, Melodie Yunju Jamieson, Margaret Roerig, Monika Allin, Sara JMIR Infodemiology Original Paper BACKGROUND: Social media is an important way for governments to communicate with the public. This is particularly true in times of crisis, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, during which government officials played a strong role in promoting public health measures such as vaccines. OBJECTIVE: In Canada, provincial COVID-19 vaccine rollout was delivered in 3 phases aligned with federal government COVID-19 vaccine guidance for priority populations. In this study, we examined how Canadian public officials used Twitter to engage with the public about vaccine rollout and how this engagement has shaped public response to vaccines across jurisdictions. METHODS: We conducted a content analysis of tweets posted between December 28, 2020, and August 31, 2021. Leveraging the social media artificial intelligence tool Brandwatch Analytics, we constructed a list of public officials in 3 jurisdictions (Ontario, Alberta, and British Columbia) organized across 6 public official types and then conducted an English and French keyword search for tweets about vaccine rollout and delivery that mentioned, retweeted, or replied to the public officials. We identified the top 30 tweets with the highest impressions in each jurisdiction in each of the 3 phases (approximately a 26-day window) of the vaccine rollout. The metrics of engagement (impressions, retweets, likes, and replies) from the top 30 tweets per phase in each jurisdiction were extracted for additional annotation. We specifically annotated sentiment toward public officials’ vaccine responses (ie, positive, negative, and neutral) in each tweet and annotated the type of social media engagement. A thematic analysis of tweets was then conducted to add nuance to extracted data characterizing sentiment and interaction type. RESULTS: Among the 6 categories of public officials, 142 prominent accounts were included from Ontario, Alberta, and British Columbia. In total, 270 tweets were included in the content analysis and 212 tweets were direct tweets by public officials. Public officials mostly used Twitter for information provision (139/212, 65.6%), followed by horizontal engagement (37/212, 17.5%), citizen engagement (24/212, 11.3%), and public service announcements (12/212, 5.7%). Information provision by government bodies (eg, provincial government and public health authorities) or municipal leaders is more prominent than tweets by other public official groups. Neutral sentiment accounted for 51.5% (139/270) of all the tweets, whereas positive sentiment was the second most common sentiment (117/270, 43.3%). In Ontario, 60% (54/90) of the tweets were positive. Negative sentiment (eg, public officials criticizing vaccine rollout) accounted for 12% (11/90) of all the tweets. CONCLUSIONS: As governments continue to promote the uptake of the COVID-19 booster doses, findings from this study are useful in informing how governments can best use social media to engage with the public to achieve democratic goals. JMIR Publications 2023-07-20 /pmc/articles/PMC10361259/ /pubmed/37315194 http://dx.doi.org/10.2196/41582 Text en ©Husayn Marani, Melodie Yunju Song, Margaret Jamieson, Monika Roerig, Sara Allin. Originally published in JMIR Infodemiology (https://infodemiology.jmir.org), 20.07.2023. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work, first published in JMIR Infodemiology, is properly cited. The complete bibliographic information, a link to the original publication on https://infodemiology.jmir.org/, as well as this copyright and license information must be included. |
spellingShingle | Original Paper Marani, Husayn Song, Melodie Yunju Jamieson, Margaret Roerig, Monika Allin, Sara Public Officials’ Engagement on Social Media During the Rollout of the COVID-19 Vaccine: Content Analysis of Tweets |
title | Public Officials’ Engagement on Social Media During the Rollout of the COVID-19 Vaccine: Content Analysis of Tweets |
title_full | Public Officials’ Engagement on Social Media During the Rollout of the COVID-19 Vaccine: Content Analysis of Tweets |
title_fullStr | Public Officials’ Engagement on Social Media During the Rollout of the COVID-19 Vaccine: Content Analysis of Tweets |
title_full_unstemmed | Public Officials’ Engagement on Social Media During the Rollout of the COVID-19 Vaccine: Content Analysis of Tweets |
title_short | Public Officials’ Engagement on Social Media During the Rollout of the COVID-19 Vaccine: Content Analysis of Tweets |
title_sort | public officials’ engagement on social media during the rollout of the covid-19 vaccine: content analysis of tweets |
topic | Original Paper |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10361259/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37315194 http://dx.doi.org/10.2196/41582 |
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