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Social Bots' Involvement in the COVID-19 Vaccine Discussions on Twitter
| Content Provider | MDPI |
|---|---|
| Author | Zhang, Menghan Qi, Xue Chen, Ze Liu, Jun |
| Copyright Year | 2022 |
| Description | 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. |
| Starting Page | 1651 |
| e-ISSN | 16604601 |
| DOI | 10.3390/ijerph19031651 |
| Journal | International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health |
| Issue Number | 3 |
| Volume Number | 19 |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | MDPI |
| Publisher Date | 2022-01-31 |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Subject Keyword | International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health Information and Library Science Medical Informatics Social Bots Covid-19 Vaccine Social Media Analytics Twitter |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
