Discourse on Vaccination on Russian Social Media: Topics and Controversy

Abstract

Public discussion on vaccination in Russia is vigorous and controversial, especially in the case of COVID-19. In conditions of extensively spreading myths, false information and rhetoric contradicting argumentation of scientific community social media became a place where opinions on vaccination collide. Participatory culture of commenting still remains to be a peculiar form of public health activism accessible to almost everyone. In this study, the data retrieved from the most popular Russian social networking platform Vkontakte was used. The raw dataset included 467888 news posts (published during 2021) from salient online communities and 538202 comments. Topic mining and modeling methods including PLSA and LDA were used to classify vaccination-related news posts in 6 groups, which differed in terms of language style, main focuses and discussed issues. The most engaging topic was “Vaccination on the ground” mainly because in contained an abundance of “obtrusive” issues. It was shown that the degree of user engagement did not significantly depend on salience of topic. In sum, it was revealed that 6.2% of comments was against vaccination, while, one and a half times less, 4.3% was in favor. Positive comments outweighed the negative ones only for topic “Russian vaccines in the World”.