Abstract:

With the increasing use of social media platforms, public health concerns about the impact of anti-vaccine content on vaccine hesitancy in the community have also increased. During the COVID-19 process, people have mostly shared their thoughts on vaccines via Twitter. This study aims to determine the reasons for vaccine hesitancy in society by examining the tweets about the COVID-19 vaccine by text mining and content analysis methods. In this research, 1258 tweets obtaine with anti-vaccine tags with the ORANGE application were analyzed. A word cloud was created to visualize the most used words in the analyzed tweets. As a result of the research, it has been determined that the most frequently used words are ‘‘plandemi’’ ‘‘biontechsideeffect’’ ‘‘mask’’ and ‘‘covid’’. In the second stage, the analyzed tweets were gathered under 18 themes using the content analysis method. Discourses that do not believe that the pandemic is real constitute 32.8% of tweets. 13% of tweets contain expressions of concern about the side effects and harms of the vaccine. 12.1% of the tweets are statements that think that the vaccine was produced as a biological weapon as a result of the global project. As a result of the study, the emphasis on plandemic, post-vaccine negativities and the themes that the vaccine is a biological weapon came to the fore. It is thought that public information about the side effects of the vaccine and the contents of the vaccines has the potential to reduce vaccine insecurity in society. In addition, it is thought that public health agencies can work together with Twitter and other media outlets to increase positive messages, reduce antagonistic contents, and suspend anti-vaccine accounts such as bots.

Keywords: