The Brazilian Vaccination Debate on YouTube: Topics, Perspectives, and Engagement Dynamics

Abstract

Vaccination debates are central to online public health communication, as COVID-19 intensified disputes over scientific authority, institutional trust, and political identity. Yet studies often isolate semantic structure, stance, misinformation, and engagement, leaving their interplay over time poorly understood. We conduct a multilevel computational text analysis based on language models applied to 1.27 million Brazilian YouTube comments from 2018 to 2024, using what is, to our knowledge, the largest dataset of Brazilian vaccine discourse on the Web. We contrast producer framing in titles with audience discourse in comments, integrating Topic-derived themes with engagement metadata, conversational timing, stance-derived vaccine positions, and pre-pandemic, pandemic, and post-pandemic periods. Results show that COVID-19 dominates biomedical and informational themes in titles, whereas comments span personal health reports, vaccine effects, information credibility, conspiracy narratives, and political disputes. Health-related macro-topics dominate in scale and persistence, while conspiratorial and political themes are associated with faster interactions and a greater concentration of vaccine-opposing engagement. Post-pandemic activity remains centered on health experiences, vaccine effects, and information credibility, indicating no return to the pre-pandemic thematic configuration. By integrating semantic, interactional, stance, and temporal dimensions, this study shows how audiences reframe producer-framed health content and how vaccine controversies persist beyond the acute pandemic period.