Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, NY, United States.
William Paterson University, Wayne, NJ, United States.
JMIR Public Health Surveill. 2021 May 6;7(5):e28352. doi: 10.2196/28352.
Social media platforms such as YouTube are used by many people to seek and share health-related information that may influence their decision-making about COVID-19 vaccination.
The purpose of this study was to improve the understanding about the sources and content of widely viewed YouTube videos on COVID-19 vaccination.
Using the keywords "coronavirus vaccination," we searched for relevant YouTube videos, sorted them by view count, and selected two successive samples (with replacement) of the 100 most widely viewed videos in July and December 2020, respectively. Content related to COVID-19 vaccines were coded by two observers, and inter-rater reliability was demonstrated.
The videos observed in this study were viewed over 55 million times cumulatively. The number of videos that addressed fear increased from 6 in July to 20 in December 2020, and the cumulative views correspondingly increased from 2.6% (1,449,915 views) to 16.6% (9,553,368 views). There was also a large increase in the number of videos and cumulative views with respect to concerns about vaccine effectiveness, from 6 videos with approximately 6 million views in July to 25 videos with over 12 million views in December 2020. The number of videos and total cumulative views covering adverse reactions almost tripled, from 11 videos with approximately 6.5 million (11.7% of cumulative views) in July to 31 videos with almost 15.7 million views (27.2% of cumulative views) in December 2020.
Our data show the potentially inaccurate and negative influence social media can have on population-wide vaccine uptake, which should be urgently addressed by agencies of the United States Public Health Service as well as its global counterparts.
许多人使用 YouTube 等社交媒体平台来寻找和分享与健康相关的信息，这些信息可能会影响他们对 COVID-19 疫苗接种的决策。
本研究旨在增进对 YouTube 上关于 COVID-19 疫苗接种的广泛观看视频的来源和内容的理解。
使用关键词“冠状病毒疫苗接种”，我们搜索了相关的 YouTube 视频，按观看次数排序，并分别于 2020 年 7 月和 12 月选择了前 100 个最受欢迎视频的两个连续样本（有替换）。两位观察者对与 COVID-19 疫苗相关的内容进行了编码，并证明了评分者间的可靠性。
本研究中观察到的视频累计观看次数超过 5500 万次。2020 年 7 月，涉及恐惧的视频数量从 6 个增加到 20 个，相应的累计观看次数从 2.6%（1,449,915 次）增加到 16.6%（9,553,368 次）。关于疫苗有效性的担忧，视频数量和累计观看次数也大幅增加，从 7 月的 6 个视频和大约 600 万次观看增加到 12 月的 25 个视频和超过 1200 万次观看。涉及不良反应的视频数量和总累计观看次数几乎增加了两倍，从 7 月的 11 个视频和大约 650 万次（累计观看次数的 11.7%）增加到 12 月的 31 个视频和近 1570 万次观看（累计观看次数的 27.2%）。
我们的数据显示，社交媒体可能对人群疫苗接种率产生潜在的不准确和负面影响，这应该由美国公共卫生署及其全球对应机构紧急解决。
