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Anti-Vaccine Discourse on Social Media: An Exploratory Audit of Negative Tweets about Vaccines and Their Posters
As the anti-vaccination movement is spreading around the world, this paper addresses the ever more urgent need for health professionals, communicators and policy-makers to grasp the nature of vaccine mis/disinformation on social media. A one-by-one coding of 4511 vaccine-related tweets posted from t...
Autores principales: | , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
MDPI
2022
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9782243/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36560477 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/vaccines10122067 |
Sumario: | As the anti-vaccination movement is spreading around the world, this paper addresses the ever more urgent need for health professionals, communicators and policy-makers to grasp the nature of vaccine mis/disinformation on social media. A one-by-one coding of 4511 vaccine-related tweets posted from the UK in 2019 resulted in 334 anti-vaccine tweets. Our analysis shows that (a) anti-vaccine tweeters are quite active and widely networked users on their own; (b) anti-vaccine messages tend to focus on the “harmful” nature of vaccination, based mostly on personal experience, values and beliefs rather than hard facts; (c) anonymity does not make a difference to the types of posted anti-vaccine content, but does so in terms of the volume of such content. Communication initiatives against anti-vaccination should (a) work closely with technological platforms to tackle anonymous anti-vaccine tweets; (b) focus efforts on mis/disinformation in three major arears (in order of importance): the medical nature of vaccines, the belief that vaccination is a tool of manipulation and control for money and power, and the “freedom of health choice” discourse against mandatory vaccination; and (c) go beyond common factual measures—such as detecting, labelling or removing fake news—to address emotions induced by personal memories, values and beliefs. |
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