An Analysis of Omicron Tweets: 30% are Skeptical of the Medical Establishment

Social media is often criticized for spreading anti-vaccination posts. For example:

But how common are these types of tweets really?

And with Omicron's arrival, what sentiments do Twitter users have around COVID-19 now? Are they scared of Omicron's high infectiousness? Jaded by the possibility that COVID is here to stay? Skeptical of the disease and distrustful of the news around it?

In order to answer these questions, we created a dataset of 2000 recent Omicron tweets and labeled the emotions behind them.

In short:

• 30% of Omicron tweets are skeptical of the medical consensus that vaccines and masks are effective at minimizing the spread of coronavirus.
• 35% of Omicron tweets that mention vaccines are anti-vaccine. If we limit to tweets from medical workers, this number drops to 11%.
• 71% of Omicron tweets express anger, fear, or skepticism. 27% express happiness or compassion. 14% express indifference.
  

For more details, read below!

Methodology

We first filtered for tweets from Individuals (as opposed to Organizations), and categorized them into four types:

• Skeptical tweets that explicitly denied that COVID is real or that vaccines or masks are effective
• Positive tweets that expressed happiness, relief, compassion, or lack of concern about the new variant
• Negative tweets that expressed fear, hopelessness, or anger
• Objective tweets with purely factual content (school closure notices, case count statistics, etc.)
  

Medical Skepticism and Distrust

The most common emotion in Omicron tweets is skepticism of the official medical consensus. Tweets like the one below accounted for 30% of tweets with any emotional content:

Pro- and Anti-Vaccination Views

10% of tweets explicitly mentioned vaccination. How did people feel about the vaccines?

~65% were pro-vaccine. ~35%, however, were anti-vaccine and distrustful of the medical establishment.

January Blues

Anger and Fear are the dominant emotions among Twitter users who do believe in COVID.

Anger was almost 3x as common as compassion:

Fear was 2.5x more common than happiness or relief:

But Twitter isn't all doom and gloom. 10% of users shared happy news like the tweet below:

What’s up, Doc?

How do medical workers feel compared to the general public? We also categorized whether tweets came from users who identified as doctors or nurses. 

Just like the rest of us, healthcare workers are mostly afraid and angry, and many of their tweets contained personal stories:

There’s one way that doctors are unique, though: they really encourage vaccination. Medical professionals were three times more likely to tweet their opinion about vaccination, which was overwhelmingly in favor at 89%.

While some anti-vax messages did come from self-identified medical professionals:

They were outnumbered by pleas for people to get vaccinated 9-to-1:

Until next week, stay safe and stay curious. And if you're interested in our full dataset of Omicron reactions, shoot us an email at team@surgehq.ai! 

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