Incivility in COVID-19 Vaccine Mandate Discourse and Moral Foundations: Natural Language Processing Approach

Area of Science:

• Social Psychology
• Public Health Communication
• Computational Linguistics

Background:

• Vaccine hesitancy is a major obstacle to mitigating COVID-19 pandemic effects.
• Antivaccine discourse on social media, fueled by politicization, has increased incivility regarding vaccine mandates.
• Uncivil discourse is known to reduce confidence in COVID-19 vaccines.

Purpose of the Study:

• To examine the moral foundations (e.g., care, fairness, loyalty) that underpin uncivil discourse about COVID-19 vaccines.
• To investigate the association between moral foundations and specific dimensions of incivility (e.g., toxicity, insults, identity attacks).
• To compare the prevalence of incivility between two distinct antivaccine subreddits: r/coronaviruscirclejerk and r/lockdownskepticism.

Main Methods:

• Natural language processing (NLP) was employed to analyze moral foundations in uncivil discourse.
• Data from r/coronaviruscirclejerk and r/lockdownskepticism subreddits were collected and filtered for COVID-19 vaccine and mandate-related terms.
• A 10% sample of filtered posts and comments was analyzed to identify associations between moral foundations and incivility dimensions.

Main Results:

• Moral foundations, excluding authority, were substantially associated with dimensions of incivility like toxicity, insults, profanity, threat, and identity attack.
• Significant differences in incivility dimensions were observed between the two subreddits.
• r/lockdownskepticism exhibited significantly lower levels of identity attack, insult, toxicity, profanity, and threat compared to r/coronaviruscirclejerk (P<.001).

Conclusions:

• Moral foundations play a significant role in shaping uncivil vaccine discourse.
• Public health practitioners should tailor messaging to address the underlying moral values driving vaccine concerns.
• Integrating moral foundations into public health communication strategies may enhance vaccine compliance and foster more civil discourse.