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Polarization and trust in the evolution of vaccine discourse on Twitter during COVID-19

Trust in vaccination is eroding, and attitudes about vaccination have become more polarized. This is an observational study of Twitter analyzing the impact that COVID-19 had on vaccine discourse. We identify the actors, the language they use, how their language changed, and what can explain this cha...

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Autores principales: Ojea Quintana, Ignacio, Reimann, Ritsaart, Cheong, Marc, Alfano, Mark, Klein, Colin
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9749990/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36516117
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0277292
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author Ojea Quintana, Ignacio
Reimann, Ritsaart
Cheong, Marc
Alfano, Mark
Klein, Colin
author_facet Ojea Quintana, Ignacio
Reimann, Ritsaart
Cheong, Marc
Alfano, Mark
Klein, Colin
author_sort Ojea Quintana, Ignacio
collection PubMed
description Trust in vaccination is eroding, and attitudes about vaccination have become more polarized. This is an observational study of Twitter analyzing the impact that COVID-19 had on vaccine discourse. We identify the actors, the language they use, how their language changed, and what can explain this change. First, we find that authors cluster into several large, interpretable groups, and that the discourse was greatly affected by American partisan politics. Over the course of our study, both Republicans and Democrats entered the vaccine conversation in large numbers, forming coalitions with Antivaxxers and public health organizations, respectively. After the pandemic was officially declared, the interactions between these groups increased. Second, we show that the moral and non-moral language used by the various communities converged in interesting and informative ways. Finally, vector autoregression analysis indicates that differential responses to public health measures are likely part of what drove this convergence. Taken together, our results suggest that polarization around vaccination discourse in the context of COVID-19 was ultimately driven by a trust-first dynamic of political engagement.
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spelling pubmed-97499902022-12-15 Polarization and trust in the evolution of vaccine discourse on Twitter during COVID-19 Ojea Quintana, Ignacio Reimann, Ritsaart Cheong, Marc Alfano, Mark Klein, Colin PLoS One Research Article Trust in vaccination is eroding, and attitudes about vaccination have become more polarized. This is an observational study of Twitter analyzing the impact that COVID-19 had on vaccine discourse. We identify the actors, the language they use, how their language changed, and what can explain this change. First, we find that authors cluster into several large, interpretable groups, and that the discourse was greatly affected by American partisan politics. Over the course of our study, both Republicans and Democrats entered the vaccine conversation in large numbers, forming coalitions with Antivaxxers and public health organizations, respectively. After the pandemic was officially declared, the interactions between these groups increased. Second, we show that the moral and non-moral language used by the various communities converged in interesting and informative ways. Finally, vector autoregression analysis indicates that differential responses to public health measures are likely part of what drove this convergence. Taken together, our results suggest that polarization around vaccination discourse in the context of COVID-19 was ultimately driven by a trust-first dynamic of political engagement. Public Library of Science 2022-12-14 /pmc/articles/PMC9749990/ /pubmed/36516117 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0277292 Text en © 2022 Ojea Quintana et al https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Ojea Quintana, Ignacio
Reimann, Ritsaart
Cheong, Marc
Alfano, Mark
Klein, Colin
Polarization and trust in the evolution of vaccine discourse on Twitter during COVID-19
title Polarization and trust in the evolution of vaccine discourse on Twitter during COVID-19
title_full Polarization and trust in the evolution of vaccine discourse on Twitter during COVID-19
title_fullStr Polarization and trust in the evolution of vaccine discourse on Twitter during COVID-19
title_full_unstemmed Polarization and trust in the evolution of vaccine discourse on Twitter during COVID-19
title_short Polarization and trust in the evolution of vaccine discourse on Twitter during COVID-19
title_sort polarization and trust in the evolution of vaccine discourse on twitter during covid-19
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9749990/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36516117
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0277292
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