“Hey Alexa, what do you know about the COVID-19 vaccine?”— (Mis)perceptions of mass immunization and voice assistants

In this paper, we analyzed the perceived accuracy of COVID-19 vaccine information spoken back by Amazon Alexa. Unlike social media, Amazon Alexa does not apply soft moderation to unverified content, allowing for use of third-party malicious skills to arbitrarily phrase COVID-19 vaccine information. The results from a 210-participant study suggest that a third-party malicious skill could successful reduce the perceived accuracy among the users of information as to who gets the vaccine first, vaccine testing, and the side effects of the vaccine. We also found that the vaccine-hesitant participants are drawn to pessimistically rephrased Alexa responses focused on the downsides of the mass immunization. We discuss solutions for soft moderation against misperception-inducing or other malicious third-party skills.