Abstract
During the COVID-19 pandemic, different conspiracies have risen, with the most dangerous being those focusing on vaccines. Today, there exists a social media movement focused on destroying the credibility of vaccines and trying to convince people to ignore the advice of governments and health organizations on vaccination. Our aim was to analyze a COVID-19 antivaccination message campaign on Twitter that uses Spanish as the main language, to find the key elements in their communication strategy. Twitter data were retrieved from 14 to 28 December using NodeXL software. We analyzed tweets in Spanish, focusing on influential users, most influential tweets, and content analysis of tweets. The results revealed ordinary citizens who ‘offer the truth’ as the most important profile in this network. The content analysis showed antivaccine tweets (31.05%) as the most frequent. The analysis of anti-COVID19 tweets showed that attacks against vaccine safety were the most important (79.87%) but we detected a new kind of message presenting the vaccine as a means of manipulating the human genetic code (8.1%). We concluded that the antivaccine movement and its tenets have great influence in the COVID-19 negationist movement. We observed a new topic in COVID-19 vaccine hoaxes that must be considered in our fight against misinformation.
Highlights
Published: 15 June 2021The COVID-19 disease, which started in Wuhan, China, had its first case reported in December 2019 and continues today [1,2]
The present study focused on message analysis within the network #yonomevacuno. These messages were written in Spanish via Twitter, and all of them included information about the vaccine, vaccination process, or the COVID-19 pandemic, where users expressed a diversity of opinions about the management of the pandemic
To the knowledge of the authors, the present study is the first to address the analysis of a network focused on the dissemination of COVID-19 antivaccination messages in the Spanish-speaking community on Twitter
Summary
Published: 15 June 2021The COVID-19 disease, which started in Wuhan, China, had its first case reported in December 2019 and continues today [1,2]. Vaccines have historically been one of the most relevant successes in terms of public health due to their key role the prevention of infectious diseases in human populations [7], they have had to face many detractors such as groups of people who are against vaccination [8]. These groups are defined as the antivaccine movement, which denies the advantages and benefits of vaccines under the premise of being exposed to a greater risk based on false information about vaccine security, composition, or even side-effects [9]. Just 1 year after the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus outbreak that caused the pandemic, the scientific community achieved, after great efforts, effective vaccines against COVID-19 [10], Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations
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