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Conspiracies, misinformation and resistance to public health measures during COVID-19 in white nationalist online communication
Recent studies documented alarming growth in antiscientific discourse among extremist groups online and especially the relatively high anti-vaccine attitudes among White Nationalists (WN). In light of accelerated politization of COVID-19 containment measures and the expansion of containment to lockd...
Autores principales: | , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Elsevier Ltd.
2023
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10040359/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37005101 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.vaccine.2023.03.050 |
Sumario: | Recent studies documented alarming growth in antiscientific discourse among extremist groups online and especially the relatively high anti-vaccine attitudes among White Nationalists (WN). In light of accelerated politization of COVID-19 containment measures and the expansion of containment to lockdowns, masking, and more, we examine current sentiment, themes and argumentation in white nationalist discourse, regarding the COVID-19 vaccines and other containment measures. We use unsupervised machine learning approaches to analyze all conversations posted in the “Coronavirus (Covid-19)” sub-forum on Stormfront between January 2020 and December 2021 (N = 9642 posts). Additionally, we manually analyze sentiment and argumentation in 300 randomly sampled posts. We identified four discursive themes: Science, Conspiracies, Sociopolitical, and Containment. Negative- sentiment was substantially higher than what was found in prior work done before COVID-19 regarding vaccines and other containment measures. The negativity was driven mostly by arguments adapted from the anti-vaccine movement and not by WN ideology. |
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