Summary
As a follow up to tha last, in this Dokidoki Alert, we conduct an in-depth analysis on the “liveliness” and “content source” of 4 vaccines – AZ, Moderna, Medigen, and BNT – in and across 4 data sources – Facebook, Taiwan’s news media, CCP outlets, and Weibo. Key findings are as followed:
- In Taiwan’s information space, AZ has the highest liveliness most of the time April-August, with a downward trend, surpassed by Medigen mid-August. In China’s information space, BNT has the highest liveliness most of the time, with peaks of liveliness of Medigen in mid-August, surpassing all other vaccines.
- On the liveliness trend of vaccines, the correlation of CCP outlets and Taiwan is higher than that of CCP outlets and Weibo. This could indicate a greater “closeness” held by CCP outlets in following vaccine-related events in Taiwan, compared to the Chinese social media Weibo.
- Medigen is the “most cared about” vaccine of the Chinese state agencies and state media. Comparing the vaccine liveliness trend correlation of CCP outlets and Taiwan, Medigen is the highest among the 4, indicating CCP outlets closely followed the development of Medigen in Taiwan. Moreover, the liveliness of Medigen on CCP outlets from mid-July surpassed China’s own Sinovac and Sinopharm.
- Liveliness trend of Medigen is highly interconnected among all data sources. Medigen has the highest liveliness trend correlation of all data sources pairwise. AZ has the lowest.
- Non-original content in Facebook posts is influenced more by CCP outlets than by Taiwan’s news media.
- 51.93% of non-original content in Facebook posts regarding BNT is from CCP, higher than that from Taiwan’s news media, opposite to that of the other 3 vaccines.
- During peaks of vaccine public discourse liveliness, the influence of Taiwan’s news media increases.
- Among Medigen and BNT-related Facebook posts, content farm “Mission” (pplomo) was the 7th and 5th most-shared site, respectively, overshadowing many Taiwanese news media outlets. This shows that this content farm is still alive and well on Facebook, exerting influence to its readers on specific topics.
“Liveliness”
- “Liveliness” of vaccines = number of vaccine-related articles as a percentage to the total number of articles in a given timeframe within a specific data source
- “Liveliness” of a specific brand of vaccine = number of articles related to a specific brand of vaccine as a percentage to the total number of articles in a given timeframe within a specific data source
Taiwan’s information space; China’s information space
- Taiwan’s information space = reports from Taiwanese news media + posts from Mandarin Facebook pages
- China’s information space = articles from CCP outlets + posts from Weibo
On “original”, “non-original” content, content “source”, content “from X”
- Content = sentences with 10 characters or above
- Content from X, content source (is X) = first appearance of a sentence within a specific time period
- Original, non-original content = content is original when published on X and also from X, o.w. it is on-original
- Content from CCP = content is original content from CCP government agencies or state media outlets
- Please refer to IORG Research Method for more
Full version of this Dokidoki Alert is available in Taiwanese Mandarin. Please visit https://iorg.tw/da/13 for more.
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