  This study investigated and compared public sentiment related to COVID-19
vaccines expressed on two popular social media platforms, Reddit and Twitter,
harvested from January 1, 2020, to March 1, 2022. To accomplish this task, we
created a fine-tuned DistilRoBERTa model to predict sentiments of approximately
9.5 million Tweets and 70 thousand Reddit comments. To fine-tune our model, our
team manually labeled the sentiment of 3600 Tweets and then augmented our
dataset by the method of back-translation. Text sentiment for each social media
platform was then classified with our fine-tuned model using Python and the
Huggingface sentiment analysis pipeline. Our results determined that the
average sentiment expressed on Twitter was more negative (52% positive) than
positive and the sentiment expressed on Reddit was more positive than negative
(53% positive). Though average sentiment was found to vary between these social
media platforms, both displayed similar behavior related to sentiment shared at
key vaccine-related developments during the pandemic. Considering this similar
trend in shared sentiment demonstrated across social media platforms, Twitter
and Reddit continue to be valuable data sources that public health officials
can utilize to strengthen vaccine confidence and combat misinformation. As the
spread of misinformation poses a range of psychological and psychosocial risks
(anxiety, fear, etc.), there is an urgency in understanding the public
perspective and attitude toward shared falsities. Comprehensive educational
delivery systems tailored to the population's expressed sentiments that
facilitate digital literacy, health information-seeking behavior, and precision
health promotion could aid in clarifying such misinformation.
