J Med Internet Res. 2022 Nov 9. doi: 10.2196/40701. Online ahead of print.
ABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: Social media provide an ideal medium for breeding and reinforcing vaccine hesitancy, especially during public health emergencies. Algorithmic recommendation technology and users’ selective exposure and group pressure leads to online echo chambers, causing vaccination promotion inefficiently. Avoiding or breaking echo chambers largely relies on key users’ behavior.
OBJECTIVE: To eliminate the impact of echo chambers on vaccine hesitancy during public health emergencies on social media, this research aimed to develop a framework to quantify echo chamber effect in users’ topic-selection and attitude-contagion about COVID-19 vaccines or vaccinations, detect online opinion leaders and structural hole spanners based on network-attributes, and explore the relationship of their behavior patterns and network locations, as well as the relationship of network locations and impact on topic-based and attitude-based echo chambers.
METHODS: We called Sina Weibo API to crawl tweets related to COVID-19 vaccine or vaccination and user information on Weibo, a Chinese social media. Adapting social network analysis, we examined low echo chamber effect based on topic in representational networks of information, based on attitude in communication flow networks of users, under different interactive mechanisms (retweeting, commenting). Statistical and visual analysis were used to characterize behavior patterns of key users (opinion leaders, structural hole spanners), and explore their function in avoiding or breaking topic-based and attitude-based echo chambers.
RESULTS: Users showed low echo chamber effect in vaccine-related topic selection and attitude interaction. For the former, the homophily was more obvious in retweeting than in commenting, while for latter, it’s opposite. Speakers, replicators, and monologists tended to be opinion leaders, while common users, retweeters, networkers tended to be structural hole spanners. Both leaders and spanners tended to be bridgers to disseminate diverse topics and communicate with users holding cross-cutting attitudes towards COVID-19 vaccines. Besides, users who tended to echo single topic might bridge multiple attitudes, while users who focused on diverse topics also tended to be bridgers for different attitudes.
CONCLUSIONS: This research not only revealed low echo chamber effect in vaccine hesitancy, but also dug out reasons behind it from the perspective of users, offering insights for research about echo chamber’s form, degree, formation, and depolarization, social capital, stakeholder theory, user portraits, dissemination pattern of topic and sentiment, providing strategies for public health and public opinion managers to cooperate to avoid or correct echo chamber chaos, and promote online vaccine campaign.
PMID:36367965 | DOI:10.2196/40701
