Social media and vaccine hesitancy

Area of Science:

• Public Health
• Social Sciences
• Epidemiology

Background:

• Anti-vaccination efforts on social media pose a significant threat to global health.
• The need for worldwide COVID-19 vaccination programs highlights the urgency of understanding these threats.

Purpose of the Study:

• To globally evaluate the impact of social media and online foreign disinformation on vaccination rates.
• To assess the influence of social media on public attitudes towards vaccine safety.

Main Methods:

• A large-N cross-country regression framework was employed.
• Social media usage was operationalized by public organization for action and negative vaccine discourse (tweet analysis).
• Foreign-sourced disinformation operations and vaccine hesitancy (public belief and vaccination rates) were measured.

Main Results:

• Social media use for organizing action strongly predicts beliefs that vaccines are unsafe.
• Foreign disinformation significantly predicts a drop in mean vaccination coverage (2 percentage points per unit increase).
• Foreign disinformation also increases negative vaccine-related social media activity by 15%.

Conclusions:

• A significant relationship exists between social media organization and public doubts about vaccine safety.
• Foreign disinformation campaigns are substantially linked to declining vaccination coverage.