Despite being delayed by more than two months compared to Western countries, the new coronavirus vaccination in Japan has progressed extremely quickly compared to other countries in the world.What did people think about vaccines during this time, and what kind of interest did they have?
This time, a joint research group consisting of the University of Tokyo, the National Institute of Informatics, Chiba University of Commerce, and Ghent University (Belgium) will use the “vaccine” tweeted on Twitter during the vaccination period (January to October 2021). By chronologically analyzing all tweets in Japanese, including those in Japanese, we investigated changes in people's interest in vaccines.
The target was 800 million tweets posted by 1.1 million users.Using the machine learning technology "Topic Model", these are organized into four main topics (4. personal affairs, 1. news, 2. politics, 3. conspiracy theory and humor), and the percentage of tweets on each theme We investigated the changes over time.
As a result, the tweets, which had been spread over four themes at the start of vaccination, began to concentrate on personal matters after the start of occupational vaccination in June. In October, about 4% of all tweets containing the word "vaccine" were about vaccination schedules, post-vaccination physical conditions and side effects.
The rapid increase in tweets about personal matters indicates that people's interests and concerns have shifted from social topics to personal matters, triggered by the start of workplace vaccinations, which made it possible for many people to receive vaccinations. Suggest.In addition, this meant that personal experiences about vaccination were heavily shared on Twitter, which helped foster a sense of security about vaccination and contributed to the rapid increase in vaccination rates in Japan. It is said that there is a possibility that it has become.
In this way, it is expected that the use of social media data analysis will advance in place of conventional questionnaire surveys as a means of measuring people's feelings, interests, and concerns, which is important in making policy decisions on public health and other issues. be done.
Paper information:[Journal of Medical Internet Research] Evolution of the public opinion on COVID-19 vaccination in Japan: Large-scale Twitter data analysis
