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. 2022 Jan;16(1):102367.
doi: 10.1016/j.dsx.2021.102367. Epub 2021 Dec 13.

Twitter sentiment analysis from Iran about COVID 19 vaccine

Zahra Bokaee Nezhad  1 , Mohammad Ali Deihimi  2
Affiliations

Twitter sentiment analysis from Iran about COVID 19 vaccine

Zahra Bokaee Nezhad et al. Diabetes Metab Syndr. 2022 Jan.

Abstract

Background and aims: The development of vaccines against COVID-19 has been a global purpose since the World Health Organization declared the pandemic. People usually use social media, especially Twitter, to transfer knowledge and beliefs on global concerns like COVID-19-vaccination, hence, Twitter is a good source for investigating public opinions. The present study aimed to assess Persian tweets to (1) analyze Iranian people's view toward COVID-19 vaccination. (2) Compare Iranian views toward a homegrown and imported COVID-19-vaccines.

Methods: First, a total of 803278 Persian tweets were retrieved from Twitter, mentioning COVIran Barekat (the homegrown vaccine), Pfizer/BioNTech, AstraZeneca/Oxford, Moderna, and Sinopharm (imported vaccines) between April 1, 2021 and September 30, 2021. Then, we identified sentiments of retrieved tweets using a deep learning sentiment analysis model based on CNN-LSTM architecture. Finally, we investigated Iranian views toward COVID-19-vaccination.

Results: (1) We found a subtle difference in the number of positive sentiments toward the homegrown and foreign vaccines, and the latter had the dominant positive polarity. (2) The negative sentiment regarding homegrown and imported vaccines seems to be increasing in some months. (3) We also observed no significant differences between the percentage of overall positive and negative opinions toward vaccination amongst Iranian people.

Conclusions: It is worrisome that the negative sentiment toward homegrown and imported vaccines increases in Iran in some months. Since public healthcare agencies aim to increase the uptake of COVID-19 vaccines to end the pandemic, they can focus on social media such as Twitter to promote positive messaging and decrease opposing views.

Keywords: COVID-19; Public health; SARS-CoV-2; Sentiment analysis; Vaccination.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Flowchart of the proposed model.
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Percentage of sentiment polarities towards imported and home-grown vaccines.
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
The frequency of the collected tweets regarding COVID-19 imported and Home-grown vaccines over six months.
Fig. 4
Fig. 4
The distribution of negative sentiments towards COVID-19 imported and home-grown vaccines.
Fig. 5
Fig. 5
The distribution of vaccine opinions towards COVID-19 imported and Home-grown vaccines over six months.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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