The Multilingual Twitter Discourse on Vaccination in Germany During the Covid-19 Pandemic

Media and Communication

article

Hannah Schmid-Petri¹  Moritz Bürger¹  Stephan Schlögl¹  Mara Schwind¹  Jelena Mitrović²  Ramona Kühn² 

[1] Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Passau;Faculty of Computer Science and Mathematics, University of Passau;Institute for Artificial Intelligence Research and Development of Serbia

关键词: content analysis;    Covid-19;    multilingual communities;    Twitter;    vaccination debate;   

DOI  :  10.17645/mac.v11i1.6058

学科分类：医学（综合）

来源: Cogitatio Press

【 摘 要 】

There is evidence that specific segments of the population were hit particularly hard by the Covid-19 pandemic (e.g., people with a migration background). In this context, the impact and role played by online platforms in facilitating the integration or fragmentation of public debates and social groups is a recurring topic of discussion. This is where our study ties in, we ask: How is the topic of vaccination discussed and evaluated in different language communities in Germany on Twitter during the Covid-19 pandemic? We collected all tweets in German, Russian, Turkish, and Polish (i.e., the largest migrant groups in Germany) in March 2021 that included the most important keywords related to Covid-19 vaccination. All users were automatically geocoded. The data was limited to tweets from Germany. Our results show that the multilingual debate on Covid-19 vaccination in Germany does not have many structural connections. However, in terms of actors, arguments, and positions towards Covid-19 vaccination, the discussion in the different language communities is similar. This indicates that there is a parallelism of the debates but no social-discursive integration.

【 授权许可】

CC BY