Social media strategies to affect vaccine acceptance: a systematic literature review

ABSTRACT

Introduction: Vaccine hesitancy, defined as a delay in the acceptance or the refusal of vaccines despite their availability, is a growing global threat. More individuals are turning to social media for health information, including vaccine information. As such, there is an opportunity to leverage online platforms as a means to disseminate and persuade individuals toward vaccine acceptance. We sought to review literature focused on the influence of exposure to social media content on vaccine acceptance or hesitancy.

Areas covered: This review focused on social networking sites (e.g. Facebook) and content communities (e.g. YouTube), to understand how exposure to vaccine information affected vaccine knowledge, attitudes, and intentions/behaviors. We searched PubMed, CINAHL, Scopus, and Inspec. We included English-language materials published from 2004 to 2020 and included interventional studies, observational studies, and impacts of policies. We excluded systematic reviews, protocols, editorials, letters, case reports, case studies, commentaries, opinion pieces, narrative reviews, and clinical guidelines.

Expert opinion: Social media interventions to affect vaccine acceptance is a new but growing area of study. How a communication message is framed, who delivers the message, and network structure are critical for affecting the vaccine decision-making process. Social media should be leveraged to impact vaccine uptake.

KEYWORDS:

• New media
• social media
• vaccine acceptance
• vaccine communication
• vaccine hesitancy

Article highlights

• Vaccine hesitancy is growing and has contributed to outbreaks of vaccine-preventable disease.

• Many individuals obtain information about vaccines through social media platforms.

• This review examined social media interventions designed to affect the vaccine decision-making process.

• This review found evidence that social media interventions affect vaccine knowledge, attitudes, and intentions/behaviors.

• Message attributes such as content, appeal, delivery, as well as network structure and engagement are crucial to developing effective interventions.

• Limited studies have examined social media interventions and their impact within a low- and middle-income country (LMIC) context; this is a research gap.

Declaration of interest

The authors have no relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript. This includes employment, consultancies, honoraria, stock ownership or options, expert testimony, grants or patents received or pending, or royalties.

Reviewer disclosures

Peer reviewers on this manuscript have no relevant financial or other relationships to disclose.

Additional information

Funding

This paper was funded by the Sabin Vaccine Institute. The funder had no role in study design, review and analysis, and decision to publish.