Don’t Read the Comments
Discourse About Covid-19 Vaccines in a State Health Department's Social Media Comments
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21411030 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Daniel Kenzie (0000-0002-3449-1042, North Dakota State University, corresponding author), Murphy Anderson (0000-0002-4172-9637, North Dakota State University) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 55 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 362-384 |
| Publication date | 2025-10-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Technical Writing and Communication (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0047-2816 • E-ISSN: 1541-3780 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/00472816241279821 |
| OpenAlex | W4403497489 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 37 |
As the United States rolled out COVID-19 vaccinations, state health departments attempted to communicate quickly evolving information about vaccines amid political conflict and misinformation. In October 2021, one state health department shut off comments for their social media to deplatform misinformation. To analyze this health department's Facebook page as a discursive space, our study examines user activity on the page through quantitative analysis of engagement metrics and topical clusters and qualitative analysis of user comments from January to October 2021. Our findings show that the common idea of vaccine proponents valuing data while vaccine skeptics prefer anecdote is not represented; antivaccine comments are pervaded with suspicion toward institutions, while provaccine comments largely use unproductive tactics; the two sides largely showed different sets of concerns; engagement was high during critical moments in the pandemic, and a few top influencers tended to dominate comment threads
2019-20 coronavirus outbreak · Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) · Library science · Media studies · Political science · Public relations · Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) · Social media · Sociology · State (computer science) · Computer Science · Hate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection · Law · Medicine · Misinformation and Its Impacts · Vaccine Coverage and Hesitancy · Virology
| Highly cited | No |
|---|