Geospatial vaccine misinformation risk on social media: Online insights from an English/Spanish natural language processing (NLP) analysis of vaccine-related tweets

Abstract

BackgroundMisinformation is known to affect norms, attitudes, and intentions to engage with healthy behaviors. Evidence strongly supports that Spanish speakers may be particularly affected by misinformation and its outcomes, yet current insights into the scope and scale of misinformation is primarily ethnocentric, with greater emphasis on English-language design. ObjectiveThis study applies Natural Language Processing (NLP) to analyze a corpus of English/Spanish tweets about vaccines, broadly defined, for misinformation indicators. MethodsWe analyzed NEnglish = 247,140 and NSpanish = 104,445 tweets using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic models with Coherence score calculation (model fit) with a Mallet adjustment (topic optimization). We used informal coding to name computer-identified topics and compare misinformation scope and scale between languages. ResultsThe LDA analysis yielded a 12-topic solution for English and a 14-topic solution for Spanish. Both corpora contained overlapping misinformation, including uncertainty of research guiding policy recommendations or standing in support of antivax movements. However, the Spanish data were positioned in a global context, where misinformation was directed at government equity and disparate vaccine distribution. ConclusionOur findings support that misinformation is a global issue. However, misinformation may vary depending on culture and language. As such, tailored strategies to combat misinformation in digital planes are strongly encouraged.