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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Public Health
Sec. Digital Public Health
Volume 12 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2024.1436632
This article is part of the Research Topic Vaccine Education and Promotion View all 22 articles

Can Social Media Promote Vaccination? Strategies and Effectiveness of Covid-19 Vaccine Popularization on Chinese Weibo

Provisionally accepted
Jing Xu Jing Xu 1Difan Guo Difan Guo 2,3Jing Wu Jing Wu 4Jinghong Xu Jinghong Xu 3*
  • 1 School of Journalism and Communication, Huaqiao University, Quanzhou, China
  • 2 Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China
  • 3 School of Journalism and Communication, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, Beijing, China
  • 4 School of Arts & Communication, Beijing Normal University, Zhuhai, Zhuhai, Guangdong Province, China

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    The COVID-19 pandemic has shown a high severity in terms of mortality, and to mitigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, a great deal of reliance has been placed on vaccines with defensive effects. In the context of the transmission of hazardous Omicron variant strains, vaccine popularization and acceptance are very important to ensure world health security. Social media can spread information and increase public confidence in and acceptance of vaccines. In this study, weibos related to "vaccine science popularization" during the COVID-19 pandemic in China were collected, and Weibo publishers were divided into Individuals, Organizations, Media, Government, and Scientists. The communication strategies were analyzed with content analysis from the four dimensions of Issue, Topic, Frame, and Position. SnowNLP was used to mine the audience comments and to assess their emotional tendencies. Finally, hierarchical regression was used to verify the causal relationship between vaccine science popularization strategy and audience emotion. We found that the higher the scientific authority of the Weibo publisher, the more positive the emotional tendency of the audience towards the weibo. Issues that are scientific, authoritative, and positive issues, topics that positively present the advantages of the Covid-19 vaccine, and frames with detailed narratives, scientific arguments, diversified forms of presentations, and positions in support of the Covid-19 vaccine, positively affect the effect of vaccine popularization. Based on the experience of Covid-19 vaccine promotion in China, the results may serve as a reference for promoting innovative vaccines and handling public health affairs around the world.

    Keywords: Vaccines, COVID-19, Vaccine acceptance, sentiment, Social Media, outreach strategy

    Received: 18 Jul 2024; Accepted: 07 Nov 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Xu, Guo, Wu and Xu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Jinghong Xu, School of Journalism and Communication, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, 100875, Beijing, China

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.