Risk perception and social media engagement

The public debate on vaccination during the second year of the Covid-19 pandemic

Abstract

: In this article, we start from the hypothesis that the COVID-19 pandemic has transformed the public debate on vaccination on social media. In the current configuration of the "Risk Society" (Beck, 1992), risk management becomes a central component of everyday life, influencing how the public accesses and interacts with health-related information in media spaces. Given this scenario, we aim to verify whether the advance of coronavirus vaccination coverage and the positive results obtained in confronting the pandemic throughout the second year of the crisis have been reflected in the nature of information circulating about vaccines. Against this background, our goal was to identify changes and continuities of the contents that guide this debate in the Brazilian context. To this end, we analyzed the 100 links with the most engagement during the second year of the pandemic (2021), comparing them quantitatively with the first year (2020) and with the period preceding the health crisis (2018-2019). Our methodology is inspired by Content Analysis and structured from five categories: engagement, theme, accuracy, positioning, and risk calculation. Among the main results achieved, we observed in the corpus a reduction of disinformation content, possibly associated with the fact that, in the face of the effectiveness of immunizers, vaccines have ceased to be a priority theme in the disputes of meaning present in the public debate. Moreover, we identified a sharp drop in the total engagement on the subject in 2021.