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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...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Nguyen, An, Catalan-Matamoros, Daniel
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2022
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
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author Nguyen, An
Catalan-Matamoros, Daniel
author_facet Nguyen, An
Catalan-Matamoros, Daniel
author_sort Nguyen, An
collection PubMed
description 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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spelling pubmed-97822432022-12-24 Anti-Vaccine Discourse on Social Media: An Exploratory Audit of Negative Tweets about Vaccines and Their Posters Nguyen, An Catalan-Matamoros, Daniel Vaccines (Basel) Article 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. MDPI 2022-12-01 /pmc/articles/PMC9782243/ /pubmed/36560477 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/vaccines10122067 Text en © 2022 by the authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Nguyen, An
Catalan-Matamoros, Daniel
Anti-Vaccine Discourse on Social Media: An Exploratory Audit of Negative Tweets about Vaccines and Their Posters
title Anti-Vaccine Discourse on Social Media: An Exploratory Audit of Negative Tweets about Vaccines and Their Posters
title_full Anti-Vaccine Discourse on Social Media: An Exploratory Audit of Negative Tweets about Vaccines and Their Posters
title_fullStr Anti-Vaccine Discourse on Social Media: An Exploratory Audit of Negative Tweets about Vaccines and Their Posters
title_full_unstemmed Anti-Vaccine Discourse on Social Media: An Exploratory Audit of Negative Tweets about Vaccines and Their Posters
title_short Anti-Vaccine Discourse on Social Media: An Exploratory Audit of Negative Tweets about Vaccines and Their Posters
title_sort anti-vaccine discourse on social media: an exploratory audit of negative tweets about vaccines and their posters
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9782243/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36560477
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/vaccines10122067
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