Barely Tweeting and Rarely About Racism
Assessing U.S. State Health Department Twitter Use During the COVID-19 Vaccine Rollout
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Report Publish Date: July 21, 2022
This journal article describes a study of the ways state health departments did—or didn’t—use Twitter to inform people about COVID-19 vaccination.
Primary Takeaways
During the four months studied (October 19, 2020, to February 28, 2021), more than half (55%) of tweets by state health departments were about COVID. Few tweets were about race or ethnicity, equity, mistrust, or racism.
About a quarter (24%) of health departments’ tweets were about vaccination. Few of these tweets were also about the other themes the researchers searched for.
States varied greatly in the amount of tweeting they did, from zero tweets from Wyoming’s health department to nearly 2,500 from Massachusetts’ health department.
Overview and Objectives
During the COVID-19 pandemic, racism and the potential for COVID-19 inequities during the vaccination rollout were hotly discussed on Twitter. The authors wanted to know whether state health departments were engaging in the conversation.
Hypothesis or Approach
The authors collected four months of tweets from the official Twitter accounts of the health departments in all 50 states and Washington, D.C. Tweets were posted in the 54 days before the Food and Drug Administration gave Pfizer emergency use authorization for its coronavirus vaccine and the 79 days after.
The researchers used demographic data from the 2019 American Community Survey five-year estimates. They searched for key terms in six categories: COVID, vaccine-related terms, race and ethnicity related terms, words related to inequity and injustice, words related to mistrust, and words and phrases related to racism.
How This Influences Change
Social media is a low-cost and popular method of reaching the public that state health departments could consider using to engage in conversations about how they are addressing public health inequities and racism.
Research: Go Deeper
Introduction: The general public was discussing racism and potential inequities in COVID-19 vaccinations among African Americans on Twitter before the first COVID-19 vaccine received emergency use authorization, but it is unclear how US state health departments (SHDs) were using Twitter to address the inequities. This study examines the frequency, content and timing of SHD tweets during the US rollout of the first SARS Co-V2 vaccine.
Methods: This was a prospective study of tweets posted from the official Twitter accounts of each of the 50 US SHDs and the DC health department from October 19, 2020 to February 28, 2021. We retrieved the content and metadata of 100% of their tweets; calculated frequencies and proportions of tweets containing key terms related to COVID-19 vaccines, equity and racism; stratified the data by region; and charted longitudinal trends.
Results: Overall, SHDs tweeted infrequently, and rarely tweeted about inequities, mistrust or racism. Though 55.48% of all SHD tweets were about COVID-19, hardly any tweets contained the terms: race/ethnicity (1.20%); equity (1.09); mistrust (.59%); or racism (.06%). Similar patterns existed among vaccination-related tweets, which accounted for 24.38% of all tweets. Only 21.64% of vaccination-related tweets containing any race/ethnicity, equity, mistrust, or racism terms were posted prior to the first Emergency Use Authorization (EUA). Those about African Americans (70.45%) were posted ≥8 weeks after EUA.
Conclusions: Concerns about racism and inequities in COVID-19 vaccination continue on Twitter, but SHDs rarely tweet about them. This strikes a worrisome chord of disconnection from the science linking health inequities to racism.
Ethn Dis., July 21, 2022. doi: 10.18865/ed.32.3.257
Research Team
This study and report was conducted and created by the following people.
- Bradford NJ
- Amani B
- Walker VP
- Sharif MZ
- Ford CL
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