Influence of Tweets Indicating False Rumors on COVID-19 Vaccination: Case Study

BACKGROUND: As of December 2022, the outbreak of COVID-19 showed no sign of abating, continuing to impact people’s lives, livelihoods, economies, and more. Vaccination is an effective way to achieve mass immunity. However, in places such as Japan, where vaccination is voluntary, there are people who choose not to receive the vaccine, even if an effective vaccine is offered. To promote vaccination, it is necessary to clarify what kind of information on social media can influence attitudes toward vaccines. OBJECTIVE: False rumors and counterrumors are often posted and spread in large numbers on social media, especially during emergencies. In this paper, we regard tweets that contain questions or point out errors in information as counterrumors. We analyze counterrumors tweets related to the COVID-19 vaccine on Twitter. We aimed to answer the following questions: (1) what kinds of COVID-19 vaccine–related counterrumors were posted on Twitter, and (2) are the posted counterrumors related to social conditions such as vaccination status? METHODS: We use the following data sets: (1) counterrumors automatically collected by the “rumor cloud” (18,593 tweets); and (2) the number of COVID-19 vaccine inoculators from September 27, 2021, to August 15, 2022, published on the Prime Minister’s Office’s website. First, we classified the contents contained in counterrumors. Second, we counted the number of COVID-19 vaccine–related counterrumors from data set 1. Then, we examined the cross-correlation coefficients between the numbers of data sets 1 and 2. Through this verification, we examined the correlation coefficients for the following three periods: (1) the same period of data; (2) the case where the occurrence of the suggestion of counterrumors precedes the vaccination (negative time lag); and (3) the case where the vaccination precedes the occurrence of counterrumors (positive time lag). The data period used for the validation was from October 4, 2021, to April 18, 2022. RESULTS: Our classification results showed that most counterrumors about the COVID-19 vaccine were negative. Moreover, the correlation coefficients between the number of counterrumors and vaccine inoculators showed significant and strong positive correlations. The correlation coefficient was over 0.7 at −8, −7, and −1 weeks of lag. Results suggest that the number of vaccine inoculators tended to increase with an increase in the number of counterrumors. Significant correlation coefficients of 0.5 to 0.6 were observed for lags of 1 week or more and 2 weeks or more. This implies that an increase in vaccine inoculators increases the number of counterrumors. These results suggest that the increase in the number of counterrumors may have been a factor in inducing vaccination behavior. CONCLUSIONS: Using quantitative data, we were able to reveal how counterrumors influence the vaccination status of the COVID-19 vaccine. We think that our findings would be a foundation for considering countermeasures of vaccination.