Not just conspiracy theories: Vaccine opponents and proponents add to the COVID-19 'infodemic' on Twitter.

Abstract

In February 2020, the World Health Organization announced an ‘infodemic’ -- a deluge of both accurate and inaccurate health information -- that accompanied the global pandemic of COVID-19 as a major challenge to effective health communication. We assessed content from the most active vaccine accounts on Twitter to understand how existing online communities contributed to the ‘infodemic’ during the early stages of the pandemic. While we expected vaccine opponents to share misleading information about COVID-19, we also found vaccine proponents were not immune to spreading less reliable claims. In both groups, the single largest topic of discussion consisted of narratives comparing COVID-19 to other diseases like seasonal influenza, often downplaying the severity of the novel coronavirus. When considering the scope of the ‘infodemic,’ researchers and health communicators must move beyond focusing on known bad actors and the most egregious types of misinformation to scrutinize the full spectrum of information -- from both reliable and unreliable sources -- that the public is likely to encounter online.