A Critical Discourse Analysis of Covid-19 Vaccine-related Discussion on Twitter

Abstract

The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has had serious social, economic and political impacts on our everyday lives. Governments and global heath institutions around the world have identified vaccination as a sole solution for this pandemic. The approval of several coronavirus vaccines has received increasing public attention and was a highly debated topic in social media, which resulted in Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy. Vaccine hesitant individuals represent a serious threat to the global immunisation efforts because of their possible effect on vaccine uptake. In the present study, we use Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to examine Covid-19 vaccine-related twitter posts. More specifically, we drew on the principles of Wodak’s Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) as a general theoretical framework. The objectives of this study are to 1) examine vaccine opponents’ perspective of the Covid-19 vaccine, 2) investigate how important social actors are named and evaluated in the tweets discussing the Covid-19 vaccine, and 3) examine the linguistic strategies that were used by vaccine opponents to discuss the Covid-19 vaccine. For this purpose, a dataset containing 150 tweets was collected from the Twitter hashtag #NoVaccineForMe. Our results have shown that the Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy is a complex phenomenon which is affected by social and political factors. The investigation of nomination strategies has shown that vaccine opponents presented a strong us versus them mentality. Furthermore, vaccine opponents frequently associated the outgroup with negative adjectives, attributes and predications. Finally, by examining the concept of topoi, trust, safety and personal freedom emerged as main arguments which vaccine opponents employed to justify their stances.