Analyzing COVID-19 Vaccine Tweets for Tonal Shift

Abstract

On November 09, 2020, Pfizer and BioNtech announced vaccine efficacy results, possibly providing hope during the COVID-19 pandemic. Correspondingly, vaccine-related information was shared on social media platforms, including Twitter. The present research aims to investigate tonal shift resulting from this important pandemic-related event using automatic text analysis of Twitter Tweets. We examined 209,939 tweets before, and 203,490 tweets after the vaccine announcement. Pennebaker’s linguistic inquiry word count (LIWC) was used to detect tonal shifts via analytic thinking (which reflects logical thinking), clout (reflects expertise), authentic (reflects disclosure), and emotional tone (reflects emotional valence). Results indicated a decrease in authentic score implying a more guarded form of disclosure, while an increase in clout score suggests more sharing from expert users. The change was negligible for analytical thinking and emotional tone, suggesting users’ mentality towards the pandemic was not affected. Overall, results suggest a minimal shift in tone on Twitter, even in the face of the good news about the vaccine announcement. © 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.