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Characterizing polarization in online vaccine discourse-A large-scale study
Bjarke Mønsted1, Sune Lehmann1,2
1Department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science, Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby, Denmark.
Plos One
|February 9, 2022
Summary
Vaccine hesitancy is fueled by commercial sources and social media echo chambers. Understanding these dynamics is key to combating health misinformation and promoting vaccine confidence.
Area of Science:
- Public Health
- Computational Social Science
- Information Science
Background:
- Vaccine hesitancy poses a significant global health threat, exacerbated by social media's role in spreading misinformation.
- The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the urgent need to study online vaccine discourse.
Purpose of the Study:
- To analyze vaccine-related discussions on Twitter using a large dataset of tweets.
- To investigate the relationship between user attitudes, social networks, and information sources concerning vaccines.
Main Methods:
- Large-scale analysis of approximately 60 billion tweets using deep learning and transfer learning for sentiment analysis.
- Categorization of user attitudes towards vaccines and examination of user interaction networks.
Main Results:
- Anti-vaccine users predominantly share content from commercial sources selling alternative health products.
- The vaccine debate on Twitter is highly polarized, with users interacting primarily within like-minded groups.
- Evidence of an epistemic echo chamber effect, where users are exposed to information aligned with their contacts' stances.
Conclusions:
- Commercial interests and epistemic echo chambers significantly influence vaccine hesitancy on social media.
- Addressing vaccine misinformation requires understanding its dissemination within social network contexts.
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