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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...
Autores principales: | , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Public Library of Science
2022
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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. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-9749990 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2022 |
publisher | Public Library of Science |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
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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