Social media analysis applied to childhood vaccines in Italy: insights for redefining the INHS communication strategies

Italy is a country that provides an increasing number of vaccines free-of-charge to individuals, still, anti-vaccination movements are increasingly active. Since social networks represent today the most popular marketplace for ideas about health topics, the literature has started to study vaccine hesitancy online. Our research objectives are: (1) To study the sentiment regarding childhood vaccines (sentiment analysis), classifying contents into three sentiment groups: positive, neutral, and negative; (2) to point out the key features of social media communication dynamics on vaccines. Online conversations about vaccines in three Italian Regions (Veneto, Trentino and Alto Adige) in 2019 (in order to avoid bias from the COVID pandemics) are gathered and analysed, considering 421 web articles, 6698 Facebook comments and 931 tweets. Our results suggest that Facebook is an effective platform for promoting public discussion and interactions about vaccines. An interesting relationship between the tone of voice of the original post, and the sentiment of the related users’ contents was also found. Furthermore, a relevant impact of personal storytelling on the level of engagement was registered. Further research, based on these insights, could now be developed on the anti-Covid 19 vaccination campaign now in progress, which was started at the end of 2020. Social media are studied in many different disciplines from different perspectives, as computing science which is relevant in understanding and analysing large sets of shared content and their geo-spatial and temporal details. The theoretical background of our study is based on the literature around three main topics: (1) social media use for online discussion through text posts (specifically on Facebook and Twitter), (2) the more general context of vaccines evolution in Italy and (3) communication strategies in vaccinations. By exploring ideas and sentiments of users online, this work, allows to understand the relevance of the different perspectives on vaccinations (positive, neutral and negative) and the way opinions are expressed. Doing this, the healthcare authorities will obtain useful insights on (a) which online platform to use in order to engage people and (b) how to better communicate to people exploiting social media in order to reinforce the diffusion of a pro-vax perspective