The “Blue Check” Communication on the Pandemia Vaccine Campaign

This chapter has the exploratory goal of understanding the attitudes and perceptions of 'verified' Twitter (VA) accounts about the COVID-19 vaccine campaign. Identifying their sentiment and opinion about it could therefore be crucial to the success of vaccination. A content analysis of tweets from the period December 24, 2020 to March 23, 2021 about the vaccine campaign in Italy was conducted to understand the semantic strategies used by VAs based on their orientation toward the vaccine, whether pro, anti, or neutral, and their possible motivations. Topic modeling allowed the authors to detect five prevalent themes and their associated words. A sentiment analysis and opinion analysis were performed on a smaller sample of tweets. The results suggest that 'authoritative' opinion about the vaccine has been very fragmented and not entirely positive, as expected. This could prove to be a critical issue in getting the vaccine positively accepted by the public.