Exploring the Opinion Shifting of Social Media Users Based on Stance Detection

ABSTRACT Fine‐grained mining of stance change among social media users during crises contributes significantly to a comprehensive understanding of the development of public opinion online. This study collected detailed information on 227,281 Twitter users who continuously participated in the discussion about the COVID‐19 vaccine to analyze patterns of opinion shifting. Utilizing the COVID‐Twitter‐BERT pre‐trained model, we detect each user's stance on the COVID‐19 vaccine and construct a time‐series dataset reflecting their stance over time. A prediction model for users' opinion shifting is established based on the LightGBM model, and the SHAP explanation method is used to rank the importance of features to identify key features influencing the opinion shifting prediction. Our research findings indicate that nearly half of the users maintained a consistent stance on vaccines, with a relatively low proportion of shifts between pro‐vaccine and anti‐vaccine stances. The F1 value of the prediction model based on the LightGBM model is 0.92. These findings can assist in monitoring social media user opinions online.