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.
Highlights
How did existing online communities of vaccine opponents and proponents respond to early news of the novel coronavirus?
What were the dominant topics of conversation related to COVID-19? What types of misleading or false information were being shared?
We found that vaccine advocates, and especially those who did not have medical, scientific, or public health expertise, but were primarily engaging in debates with vaccine opponents, have promoted mixed messages, some of which overlapped with vaccine opponents’ messages downplaying the severity of the pandemic
Summary
How did existing online communities of vaccine opponents and proponents respond to early news of the novel coronavirus?. What were the dominant topics of conversation related to COVID-19? Which types of accounts shared misleading or false content? How do these topics vary between and within vaccine opponent and vaccine proponent Twitter communities?. We identified the 2,000 most active Twitter accounts in the vaccine discourse from 2019, identifying both vaccine opponents and proponents. In addition to tweeting about vaccines, vaccine opponents tweeted about conservative politics and conspiracy theories. Vaccine proponents tended to represent doctors, researchers, or health organizations, and included non-medical accounts. On February 20, we collected the most recent tweets for each account and automatically extracted 35 distinct topics of conversation related to COVID-19 (roughly 80,000 tweets). Misinformation included conspiracy theories, unverifiable rumors, and scams promoting untested prevention/cures
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