Dissonance between posts of health agencies and public comments regarding COVID-19 and vaccination on Facebook in Northern California.

Background: Public health crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, have prompted a need for health agencies to improve their disease preparedness strategies, informing their communities of new information and promoting preventive behaviors to help curb the spread of the virus.

Methods: We ran unsupervised machine learning and emotion analysis, validated with manual coding, on posts of health agencies (N = 1588) and their associated public comments (N = 7813) during a crucial initial period of the COVID-19 pandemic (January 2020 to February 2021) among nine different counties with a higher proportion of vaccine-hesitant communities in Northern California. In addition, we explored differences in concerns and expressed emotions by two key group-level factors, county-level COVID-19 death rate and political party affiliation.

Analyzing Public Conversations About Heart Disease and Heart Health on Facebook From 2016 to 2021: Retrospective Observational Study Applying Latent Dirichlet Allocation Topic Modeling.

Background: Heart disease continues to be the leading cause of death in men and women in the United States. The COVID-19 pandemic has further led to increases in various long-term cardiovascular complications.

Objective: This study analyzed public conversations related to heart disease and heart health on Facebook in terms of their thematic topics and sentiments.

When do people believe, check, and share health rumors on social media? Effects of evidence type, health literacy, and health knowledge.

Vaccine rumors on social media endanger public health. This study examined how evidence types influenced perceived persuasiveness and relevance and engagement intentions of vaccine rumors. We conducted a 2 (evidence type: anecdotes vs.

COVID-19 Vaccine Fact-Checking Posts on Facebook: Observational Study.

Background: Effective interventions aimed at correcting COVID-19 vaccine misinformation, known as fact-checking messages, are needed to combat the mounting antivaccine infodemic and alleviate vaccine hesitancy.

Objective: This work investigates (1) the changes in the public's attitude toward COVID-19 vaccines over time, (2) the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccine fact-checking information on social media engagement and attitude change, and (3) the emotional and linguistic features of the COVID-19 vaccine fact-checking information ecosystem.

Methods: We collected a data set of 12,553 COVID-19 vaccine fact-checking Facebook posts and their associated comments (N=122,362) from January 2020 to March 2022 and conducted a series of natural language processing and statistical analyses to investigate trends in public attitude toward the vaccine in COVID-19 vaccine fact-checking posts and comments, and emotional and linguistic features of the COVID-19 fact-checking information ecosystem.

Understanding Human Papillomavirus Vaccine Promotions and Hesitancy in Northern California Through Examining Public Facebook Pages and Groups.

Human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination coverage among adolescents is lower in rural regions and remains under the 80% coverage goal by Healthy People 2030. Through both sentiment analysis and topic modeling, this research examines how local health agencies and groups in nine Northern California counties promote HPV vaccines through Facebook and how target populations react to promotion posts in comments that elucidate their sentiments and hesitancy toward HPV vaccination. In January 2021, we identified 2,105 public Facebook pages and 1,065 groups related to health within the counties and collected a total of 212 posts and 505 comments related to the HPV vaccine.