Citation: Alam, M.T.; Sohail, S.S.; Ubaid, S.; Shakil; Ali, Z.; Hijji, M.; Saudagar, A.K.J.; Muhammad, K. It’s Your Turn, Are You Ready to Get Vaccinated? Towards an Exploration of Vaccine Hesitancy Using Sentiment Analysis of Instagram Posts. Mathematics 2022, 10, 4165. https://doi.org/10.3390/ math10224165 Academic Editor: Victor Leiva Received: 26 September 2022 Accepted: 26 October 2022 Published: 8 November 2022 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. Copyright: © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). mathematics Article It’s Your Turn, Are You Ready to Get Vaccinated? Towards an Exploration of Vaccine Hesitancy Using Sentiment Analysis of Instagram Posts Mohammed Talha Alam 1,2 , Shahab Saquib Sohail 1, * , Syed Ubaid 1,3 , Shakil 1,4 , Zafar Ali 5 , Mohammad Hijji 6 , Abdul Khader Jilani Saudagar 7 and Khan Muhammad 8, * 1 Department of Computer Science and Engineering, School of Engineering Sciences and Technology, Jamia Hamdard, New Delhi 110062, India 2 Department of Machine Learning, Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), Abu Dhabi P.O. Box 54115, United Arab Emirates 3 Department of Computer Science, Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh 202001, India 4 Faculty of Electronicand Information Technology, WarsawUniversity of Technology, Nowowiejska 15/19, 00-665 Warszawa, Poland 5 School of Computer Science and Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing 211189, China 6 Faculty of Computers and Information Technology (FCIT), University of Tabuk, Tabuk 47711, Saudi Arabia 7 Information Systems Department, College of Computer and Information Sciences, Imam Mohammad Ibn Saud Islamic University (IMSIU), Riyadh 11432, Saudi Arabia 8 Visual Analytics for Knowledge Laboratory (VIS2KNOW Lab), Department of Applied Artificial Intelligence, School of Convergence, College of Computing and Informatics, Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul 03063, Korea * Correspondence: shahabssohail@jamiahamdard.ac.in (S.S.S.); khanmuhammad@g.skku.edu (K.M.) Abstract: The deadly threat caused by the rapid spread of COVID-19 has been restricted by virtue of vaccines. However, there is misinformation regarding the certainty and positives outcome of getting vaccinated; hence, many people are reluctant to opt for it. Therefore, in this paper, we identified public sentiments and hesitancy toward the COVID-19 vaccines based on Instagram posts as part of intelligent surveillance. We first retrieved more than 10k publicly available comments and captions posted under different vaccine hashtags (namely, covaxin, covishield, and sputnik). Next, we translated the extracted comments into a common language (English), followed by the calculation of the polarity score of each comment, which helped identify the vaccine sentiments and opinions in the comments (positive, negative, and neutral) with an accuracy of more than 80%. Moreover, upon analysing the sentiments, we found that covaxin received 71.4% positive, 18.5% neutral, and 10.1% negative comments; covishield obtained 64.2% positive, 24.5% neutral, and 11.3% negative post; and sputnik received 55.8% positive, 15.5% neutral, and 28.7% negative sentiments. Understanding vaccination perceptions and views through Instagram comments, captions, and posts is helpful for public health officials seeking to enhance vaccine uptake by promoting positive marketing and reducing negative marketing. In addition to this, some interesting future directions are also suggested considering the investigated problem. Keywords: COVID-19; vaccination; vaccine hesitancy; sentiment analysis; health informatics; data analytics; intelligent surveillance; infodemics MSC: 68T01 1. Introduction COVID-19 began to wreak havoc on all aspects of life in December 2019, and the World Health Organization (WHO) declared it a pandemic in March 2020 [1]. Following the spread of COVID-19, the public’s interest in vaccine-related questions and issues grew. Vaccines have been developed by the research teams of pharmaceutical companies, research Mathematics 2022, 10, 4165. https://doi.org/10.3390/math10224165 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/mathematics