UC San Diego

The aims of this study were to qualitatively characterize sentiments of Twitter users on the topic of the COVID-19 vaccine for children, specifically in response to tweets with explicit vaccine misinformation that are authored by users who are both verified by Twitter and of minority descent. The investigative approach was through a review of the literature and content classification of tweets collected from the Twitter API. A total of 863,007 tweets were collected. From which, the 200 most retweeted tweets were subjected to manual content classification to identify four tweets with explicitly vaccine misinformation that are authored by users who are both verified by Twitter and of minority descent. The replies to these four tweets were collected from the Twitter API and subjected to manual content classification to identify themes and the Twitter bios of users who authored these replies were subjected to manual content classification to identify self-reported race, ethnicity, status as a parent or grandparent, and political affiliations. The results of this study provide insight into online sentiments surrounding the COVID-19 pediatric vaccine and specifically organic user reactions to explicit vaccine misinformation. Further studies should examine other themes related to social media-based discussions of misinformation both regarding COVID-19 misinformation and broadly scientific misinformation to better inform public health communication and improve public trust in scientific advancements.