With 745,661 vaccine-related tweets originating from three Western European countries, we compare vaccine hesitancy levels measured with our framework against that collected from multiple consecutive waves of surveys. We successfully validate that Twitter, one popular social media platform, can be used as a data source to calculate consistent public acceptance of COVID-19 vaccines with surveys at both country and region levels. In addition, this consistency persists over time although it varies among socio-demographic sub-populations. Our findings establish the power of social media in complementing social surveys to capture the continuously changing vaccine hesitancy in a global health crisis similar to the COVID-19 pandemic.
(Study published as Chen, N., Chen, X., Pang, J., Borga, L.G., D’Ambrosio, C., and Vögele, C. (2022). “Measuring COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy: Consistency of Social Media with Surveys." University of Luxembourg, mimeo.)
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