Practice Paper: Using Reddit Data to Refine Vaccine Messaging for a Plan-Do-Study-Act Communications Approach
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Language expressed in online forums can highlight which pro-vaccination messages intensify vaccine skepticism and which messages resonate with different populations. This study examined Reddit (an online discussion forum) to analyze what anonymous Canadians disclosed about their rationales for getting vaccinated against COVID-19 during the height of the pandemic. The investigation examined 266 Canadian subreddits (sub-forums on specific topics on Reddit) and evaluated 79 English-language phrases that people commonly use on Reddit to express the reason(s) why they (or someone close to them) chose to get vaccinated/boosted for COVID-19. The findings suggest that machine-learning techniques hold out the promise of a real-time approach toward public health messaging via an iterative Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.076 | 0.213 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".