A Social Network Analysis of Tweets Related to Mandatory COVID-19 Vaccination in Poland

Rafał Olszowski; Michał Zabdyr-Jamróz; Sebastian Baran; Piotr Pięta; Wasim Ahmed

doi:10.3390/vaccines10050750

A Social Network Analysis of Tweets Related to Mandatory COVID-19 Vaccination in Poland

Vaccines (Basel). 2022 May 10;10(5):750. doi: 10.3390/vaccines10050750.

Authors

Rafał Olszowski^{1

2}, Michał Zabdyr-Jamróz³, Sebastian Baran⁴, Piotr Pięta¹, Wasim Ahmed⁵

Affiliations

¹ Faculty of Humanities, AGH University of Science and Technology, Gramatyka 8a, 30-071 Kraków, Poland.
² Center for Collective Intelligence, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 245 First Street, E94, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA.
³ Faculty of Health Sciences, Institute of Public Health, Jagiellonian University Medical College, Skawinska 8 Street, 31-066 Kraków, Poland.
⁴ Department of Mathematics, Cracow University of Economics, Rakowicka 27, 31-510 Kraków, Poland.
⁵ Stirling University Management School, University of Stirling, Stirling FK9 4LA, UK.

Abstract

Poland's efforts to combat COVID-19 were hindered by endemic vaccination hesitancy and the prevalence of opponents to pandemic restrictions. In this environment, the policy of a COVID-19 vaccination mandate faces strong resistance in the public debate. Exploring the discourse around this resistance could help uncover the motives and develop an understanding of vaccination hesitancy in Poland. This paper aims to conduct a social network analysis and content analysis of Twitter discussions around the intention of the Polish Ministry of Health to introduce mandatory vaccinations for COVID-19. Twitter was chosen as a platform to study because of the critical role it played during the global health crisis. Twitter data were retrieved from 26 July to 9 December 2021 through the API v2 for Academic Research, and analysed using NodeXL and Gephi. When conducting social network analysis, nodes were ranked by their betweenness centrality. Clustering analysis with the Clauset-Newman-Moore algorithm revealed two important groups of users: advocates and opponents of mandatory vaccination. The temporal trends of tweets, the most used hashtags, the sentiment expressed in the most popular tweets, and correlations with epidemiological data were also studied. The results reveal a substantial degree of polarisation, a high intensity of the discussion, and a high degree of involvement of Twitter users. Vaccination mandate advocates were consistently more numerous, but less engaged and less mobilised to "preach" their own stances. Vaccination mandate opponents were vocal and more mobilised to participate: either as original authors or as information diffusers. Our research leads to the conclusion that systematic monitoring of the public debate on vaccines is essential not only in counteracting misinformation, but also in crafting evidence-based as well as emotionally motivating narratives.

Keywords: COVID-19; Poland; Twitter debate; mandatory vaccination; social media; social network analysis; vaccination hesitancy.

Grants and funding

This research was funded by Narodowe Centrum Nauki (National Science Centre, Republic of Poland), the research grant UMO-2018/28/C/HS5/00543—“Collective intelligence on the Internet: Applications in the public sphere, research methods and civic participation models” (“Kolektywna inteligencja w Internecie: zastosowania w sferze publicznej, metody badania i modele partycypacji obywatelskiej”). This research was funded by Jagiellonian University, Collegium Medicum. This research was funded from the funds granted to the Cracow University of Economics, within the framework of the POTENTIAL Program.