Social Bots’ Involvement in the COVID-19 Vaccine Discussions on Twitter

Menghan Zhang, Xue Qi, Ze Chen and Jun Liu
Additional contact information
Menghan Zhang: Centre for Chinese Urbanization Studies of Soochow University & Collaborative Innovation Center for New Urbanization and Social Governance of Universities, Suzhou 215006, China
Xue Qi: School of Communication, Soochow University, Suzhou 215123, China
Ze Chen: School of Communication, Soochow University, Suzhou 215123, China
Jun Liu: Department of Communication, University of Copenhagen, DK-2300 Copenhagen, Denmark

IJERPH, 2022, vol. 19, issue 3, 1-14

Abstract: During the COVID-19 pandemic, social media served as an important channel for the public to obtain health information and disseminate opinions when offline communication was severely hindered. Yet the emergence of social bots influencing social media conversations about public health threats will require researchers and practitioners to develop new communication strategies considering their influence. So far, little is known as to what extent social bots have been involved in COVID-19 vaccine-related discussions and debates on social media. This work selected a period of nearly 9 months after the approval of the first COVID-19 vaccines to detect social bots and performed high-frequency word analysis for both social bot-generated and human-generated tweets, thus working out the extent to which social bots participated in the discussion on the COVID-19 vaccine on Twitter and their participation features. Then, a textual analysis was performed on the content of tweets. The findings revealed that 8.87% of the users were social bots, with 11% of tweets in the corpus. Besides, social bots remained active over three periods. High-frequency words in the discussions of social bots and human users on vaccine topics were similar within the three peaks of discourse.

Keywords: social bots; COVID-19 vaccine; social media analytics; twitter (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/19/3/1651/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/19/3/1651/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:19:y:2022:i:3:p:1651-:d:739793

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().