scholarly journals Lack of Trust, Conspiracy Beliefs, and Social Media Use Predict COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy

Vaccines ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (6) ◽  
pp. 593
Author(s):  
Will Jennings ◽  
Gerry Stoker ◽  
Hannah Bunting ◽  
Viktor Orri Valgarðsson ◽  
Jennifer Gaskell ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Focus Groups ◽  
Vaccine Development ◽  
Population Control ◽  
Herd Immunity ◽  
Vaccine Hesitancy ◽  
Media Companies ◽  
Conspiracy Beliefs ◽  
Nationally Representative ◽  
The Uk

As COVID-19 vaccines are rolled out across the world, there are growing concerns about the roles that trust, belief in conspiracy theories, and spread of misinformation through social media play in impacting vaccine hesitancy. We use a nationally representative survey of 1476 adults in the UK between 12 and 18 December 2020, along with 5 focus groups conducted during the same period. Trust is a core predictor, with distrust in vaccines in general and mistrust in government raising vaccine hesitancy. Trust in health institutions and experts and perceived personal threat are vital, with focus groups revealing that COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy is driven by a misunderstanding of herd immunity as providing protection, fear of rapid vaccine development and side effects, and beliefs that the virus is man-made and used for population control. In particular, those who obtain information from relatively unregulated social media sources—such as YouTube—that have recommendations tailored by watch history, and who hold general conspiratorial beliefs, are less willing to be vaccinated. Since an increasing number of individuals use social media for gathering health information, interventions require action from governments, health officials, and social media companies. More attention needs to be devoted to helping people understand their own risks, unpacking complex concepts, and filling knowledge voids.

scholarly journals Lack of trust and social media echo chambers predict COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Will Jennings ◽  
Gerry Stoker ◽  
Hannah Willis ◽  
Viktor Valgardsson ◽  
Jen Gaskell ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Focus Groups ◽  
Vaccine Development ◽  
Population Control ◽  
Herd Immunity ◽  
Vaccine Hesitancy ◽  
Media Impact ◽  
Media Companies ◽  
Nationally Representative ◽  
The Uk

AbstractAs COVID-19 vaccines are rolled out across the world, there are growing concerns about the role that trust, belief in conspiracy theories and spread of misinformation through social media impact vaccine hesitancy. We use a nationally representative survey of 1,476 adults in the UK between December 12 to 18, 2020 and five focus groups conducted in the same period. Trust is a core predictor, with distrust in vaccines in general and mistrust in government raising vaccine hesitancy. Trust in health institutions and experts and perceived personal threat are vital, with focus groups revealing that COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy is driven by a misunderstanding of herd immunity as providing protection, fear of rapid vaccine development and side effects, belief the virus is man- made and related to population control. Particularly those who obtain information from relatively unregulated social media sources such as YouTube that have recommendations tailored by watch history are less likely to be willing to become vaccinated. Those who hold general conspiratorial beliefs are less willing to be vaccinated. Since an increasing number of individuals use social media for gathering health information, interventions require action from governments, health officials and social media companies. More attention needs to help people understand their own risks, unpack complex concepts and fill knowledge voids.

scholarly journals Harnessing Twitter data to survey public attention and attitudes towards COVID-19 vaccines in the UK

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Seena Fazel ◽  
Le Zhang ◽  
Babak Javid ◽  
Isabell Brikell ◽  
Zheng Chang
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Vaccine Development ◽  
Vaccine Hesitancy ◽  
Potential Contribution ◽  
Public Attention ◽  
Media Campaigns ◽  
News Announcements ◽  
News Announcement ◽  
Socio Demographic Factors ◽  
The Uk

AbstractAttitudes to COVID-19 vaccination vary considerably within and between countries. Although the contribution of socio-demographic factors to these attitudes has been studied, the role of social media and how it interacts with news about vaccine development and efficacy is uncertain. We examined around 2 million tweets from 522,893 persons in the UK from November 2020 to January 2021 to evaluate links between Twitter content about vaccines and major scientific news announcements about vaccines. The proportion of tweets with negative vaccine content varied, with reductions of 20–24% on the same day as major news announcement. However, the proportion of negative tweets reverted back to an average of around 40% within a few days. Engagement rates were higher for negative tweets. Public health messaging could consider the dynamics of Twitter-related traffic and the potential contribution of more targeted social media campaigns to address vaccine hesitancy.

scholarly journals Faster than warp speed: early attention to COVD-19 by anti-vaccine groups on Facebook

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seth C Kalichman ◽  
Lisa A Eaton ◽  
Valerie A Earnshaw ◽  
Natalie Brousseau
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Vaccine Development ◽  
Rapid Development ◽  
Development Program ◽  
Vaccine Safety ◽  
Vaccine Hesitancy ◽  
Conspiracy Theories ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Government ◽  
Vaccine Information

Abstract Background The unprecedented rapid development of COVID-19 vaccines has faced SARS-CoV- (COVID-19) vaccine hesitancy, which is partially fueled by the misinformation and conspiracy theories propagated by anti-vaccine groups on social media. Research is needed to better understand the early COVID-19 anti-vaccine activities on social media. Methods This study chronicles the social media posts concerning COVID-19 and COVID-19 vaccines by leading anti-vaccine groups (Dr Tenpenny on Vaccines, the National Vaccine Information Center [NVIC] the Vaccination Information Network [VINE]) and Vaccine Machine in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic (February–May 2020). Results Analysis of 2060 Facebook posts showed that anti-vaccine groups were discussing COVID-19 in the first week of February 2020 and were specifically discussing COVID-19 vaccines by mid-February 2020. COVID-19 posts by NVIC were more widely disseminated and showed greater influence than non-COVID-19 posts. Early COVID-19 posts concerned mistrust of vaccine safety and conspiracy theories. Conclusion Major anti-vaccine groups were sowing seeds of doubt on Facebook weeks before the US government launched its vaccine development program ‘Operation Warp Speed’. Early anti-vaccine misinformation campaigns outpaced public health messaging and hampered the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines.

Understanding vaccine hesitancy: the evidence

2021 ◽  
Vol 32 (7) ◽  
pp. 282-287
Author(s):  
Alison While
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Health Professionals ◽  
Herd Immunity ◽  
Public Health Intervention ◽  
Health Intervention ◽  
Vaccine Hesitancy ◽  
Important Public Health ◽  
Positive Attitudes ◽  
The Uk

Vaccine hesitancy is a concern both globally and within the UK. Alison While reviews the evidence relating to vaccine hesitancy, its underlying factors and the sociodemographic variations Vaccination is an important public health intervention, but its effectiveness depends upon the uptake of vaccination reaching sufficient levels to yield ‘herd’ immunity. While the majority of the UK hold positive attitudes about vaccination, some people, including health professionals, decline vaccinations. This article reviews the evidence relating to vaccine hesitancy, its underlying factors and the sociodemographic variations.

COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy on Social Media: Building a Public Twitter Dataset of Anti-vaccine Content, Vaccine Misinformation and Conspiracies (Preprint)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Goran Muric ◽  
Yusong Wu ◽  
Emilio Ferrara
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Data Collection ◽  
Herd Immunity ◽  
Application Programming Interface ◽  
Data Access ◽  
Vaccine Hesitancy ◽  
Global Public Health ◽  
News Sources ◽  
Online Social Media ◽  
Vaccination Campaigns

BACKGROUND False claims about COVID-19 vaccines can undermine public trust in ongoing vaccination campaigns, thus posing a threat to global public health. Misinformation originating from various sources has been spreading online since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Anti-vaccine activists have also begun to utilize platforms like Twitter to share their views. To properly understand the phenomenon of vaccine hesitancy through the lens of online social media, it is of greatest importance to gather the relevant data. OBJECTIVE In this paper, we describe a dataset of Twitter posts that exhibit a strong anti-vaccine stance. The dataset is made available to the research community via our AvaxTweets dataset GitHub repository. METHODS We started the ongoing data collection on October 18, 2020, leveraging the Twitter streaming application programming interface (API) to follow a set of specific anti-vaccine related keywords. Additionally, we collect the historical tweets of the set of accounts that engaged in spreading anti-vaccination narratives at some point during 2020. RESULTS Since the inception of our collection, we have published two collections: a) a streaming keyword-centered data collection with more than 1.8 million tweets, and b) a historical account-level collection with more than 135 million tweets. In this paper we present descriptive analyses showing the volume of activity over time, geographical distributions, topics, news sources, and inferred accounts’ political leaning. CONCLUSIONS The vaccine-related misinformation on social media may exacerbate the levels of vaccine hesitancy, hampering the progress toward vaccine-induced herd immunity, and potentially increase infections related to new COVID-19 variants. For these reasons, understanding vaccine hesitancy through the lens of social media is of paramount importance. Since data access is the first obstacle to attain that, we publish the dataset that can be used in studying anti-vaccine misinformation on social media and enable a better understanding of vaccine hesitancy.

scholarly journals The COVID-19 Mental Health Content Moderation Conundrum

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 205630512094818 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ysabel Gerrard
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Safety Measures ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Media Companies ◽  
Personal Connections ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Time Record ◽  
Media Society ◽  
The Uk

At the time of writing (mid-May 2020), mental health charities around the world have experienced an unprecedented surge in demand. At the same time, record-high numbers of people are turning to social media to maintain personal connections due to restrictions on physical movement. But organizations like the mental health charity Mind and even the UK Government have expressed concerns about the possible strain on mental health that may come from spending more time online during COVID-19. These concerns are unsurprising, as debates about the link between heavy social media use and mental illness raged long before the pandemic. But our newly heightened reliance on platforms to replace face-to-face communication has created even more pressure for social media companies to heighten their safety measures and protect their most vulnerable users. To develop and enact these changes, social media companies are reliant on their content moderation workforces, but the COVID-19 pandemic has presented them with two related conundrums: (1) recent changes to content moderation workforces means platforms are likely to be less safe than they were before the pandemic and (2) some of the policies designed to make social media platforms safer for people’s mental health are no longer possible to enforce. This Social Media + Society: 2K essay will address these two challenges in depth.

scholarly journals WHY SOME HESITATE MORE: CROSS-CULTURAL VARIATION IN CONSPIRACY BELIEFS, BELIEF IN SCIENCE, AND VACCINE ATTITUDES

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gul Deniz Salali ◽  
Mete Sefa Uysal
Keyword(s):  
Online Survey ◽  
Relative Effect ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Vaccine Hesitancy ◽  
Cultural Variation ◽  
Vaccine Acceptance ◽  
Country Level ◽  
Conspiracy Beliefs ◽  
The Cross ◽  
The Uk

Background: Countries differ in their levels of vaccine hesitancy (a delay in acceptance or refusal of vaccines), trust in vaccines, and acceptance of new vaccines. In this paper, we examine the factors contributing to the cross-cultural variation in vaccine attitudes, measured by levels of 1) general vaccine hesitancy, 2) trust in vaccines, and 3) COVID-19 vaccine acceptance. Methods: We examined the relative effect of conspiracy mentality, belief in COVID-19 conspiracies, and belief in science on the above-mentioned vaccine attitudes in the UK (n= 1533), US (n= 1550), and Turkey (n= 1567) through a quota-sampled online survey to match the population for age, gender, ethnicity, and education level. Results: We found that belief in COVID-19 conspiracies and conspiracy mentality were the strongest predictors of general vaccine hesitancy across all three countries. Belief in science had the largest positive effect on general vaccine trust and COVID-19 vaccine acceptance. Although participants in Turkey demonstrated the lowest level of vaccine trust, their belief in science score was significantly higher than participants in the US, suggesting that belief in science cannot explain the cross-cultural variation in vaccine trust. The mean levels of conspiracy mentality and agreement with COVID-19 conspiracies were consistent with the country-level differences in general and COVID-19 vaccine attitudes. Demographic variables did not predict vaccine attitudes as much as belief in conspiracies and science. Conclusions: Our findings suggest that cross-cultural variation in vaccine hesitancy, vaccine trust, and COVID-19 vaccine acceptance rates are mainly driven by differences in the prevalence of conspiratorial thinking across countries.

scholarly journals A qualitative thematic analysis of ‘INFODEMIC: A Stanford Conference on Social Media, Ethics, and COVID-19 Misinformation’ (Preprint)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael A. Gisondi ◽  
Daniel Chambers ◽  
Tatum Minh La ◽  
Alexa Ryan ◽  
Adyant Shankar ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Thematic Analysis ◽  
Best Practice ◽  
Vaccine Hesitancy ◽  
Primary Study ◽  
Media Ethics ◽  
The Public ◽  
Media Companies ◽  
Practice Recommendations ◽  
Qualitative Thematic Analysis

BACKGROUND The COVID-19 pandemic continues to challenge the world’s population, with approximately 266 million cases and 5 million deaths to date. COVID-19 misinformation and disinformation led to vaccine hesitancy among the public, particularly in vulnerable communities, which persists today. Social media companies are attempting to curb the ongoing spread of an overwhelming amount of COVID-19 misinformation on their platforms. In response to this problem, the authors hosted INFODEMIC: A Stanford Conference on Social Media and COVID-19 Misinformation (INFODEMIC) to develop best practices for social media companies to mitigate online misinformation and disinformation. OBJECTIVE The primary aim of this study was to develop recommendations for social media companies to address The COVID-19 Infodemic. The authors report the methods used to execute the INFODEMIC conference, conference attendee engagement and analytics, and a qualitative thematic analysis of the conference presentations. The primary study outcomes were the identified themes and corresponding recommendations. METHODS Using a constructivist paradigm, the authors conducted a thematic analysis of the 6-hour conference transcript to develop best practice recommendations. The INFODEMIC conference was the study intervention, the conference speakers were the study participants, and transcripts of their presentations were the data for this study. The authors followed the 6-step framework for thematic analysis described by Clark and Braun. They also used descriptive statistics to report measures of conference engagement including registrations, viewership, post-conference asynchronous participation, and conference evaluations. RESULTS A total of 26 participants spoke at the virtual conference and represented a wide array of occupations, expertise, and countries of origin. From their remarks, the authors identified 18 response categories and four themes: trust, equity, social media practices, and interorganizational partnerships. From these, a total of 16 best practice recommendations were formulated for social media companies, healthcare organizations, and the general public. These recommendations focused on rebuilding trust in science and medicine among certain communities, redesigning social media platforms and algorithms to reduce the spread of misinformation, improving partnerships between key stakeholders, and educating the public to critically analyze online information. Of the 1,090 conference registrants, 587 (54%) attended the live conference and another 9,996 individuals viewed or listened to the conference recordings asynchronously. Conference evaluations averaged 8.9 (best = 10). CONCLUSIONS Social media companies play a significant role in the The COVID-19 Infodemic and should adopt evidence-based measures to mitigate misinformation on their platforms.

Understanding vaccine hesitancy: the evidence

2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (6) ◽  
pp. 278-282
Author(s):  
Alison While
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Health Professionals ◽  
Herd Immunity ◽  
Public Health Intervention ◽  
Health Intervention ◽  
Vaccine Hesitancy ◽  
Important Public Health ◽  
Positive Attitudes ◽  
Vaccination Acceptance ◽  
The Uk

Vaccination is an important public health intervention, but its effectiveness depends upon the uptake of vaccination reaching sufficient levels to yield ‘herd’ immunity. While the majority of the UK hold positive attitudes about vaccination, some people, including health professionals, decline vaccinations. This article reviews the evidence relating to vaccine hesitancy, its underlying factors and the sociodemographic variations. A second article will review the evidence relating to strategies to address vaccine hesitancy and promote vaccination acceptance.

scholarly journals Understanding Drivers of Coronavirus Disease 2019 Vaccine Hesitancy Among Blacks

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Florence Momplaisir ◽  
Norrisa Haynes ◽  
Hervette Nkwihoreze ◽  
Maria Nelson ◽  
Rachel M Werner ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Focus Groups ◽  
Health Beliefs ◽  
Safety Profile ◽  
Vaccine Development ◽  
Vaccine Uptake ◽  
Vaccine Hesitancy ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Environment ◽  
Theory Approach ◽  
Racial Injustice

Abstract Background Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has disproportionately affected communities of color, with black persons experiencing the highest rates of disease severity and mortality. A vaccine against severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has the potential to reduce the race mortality gap from COVID-19; however, hesitancy toward the vaccine in the black community threatens vaccine uptake. Methods We conducted focus groups with black barbershop and salon owners living in zip codes of elevated COVID-19 prevalence to assess their attitudes, beliefs, and norms around a COVID-19 vaccine. We used a modified grounded theory approach to analyze the transcripts. Results We completed 4 focus groups (N = 24 participants) in July and August 2020. Participants were an average age of 46 years, and 89% were black non-Hispanic. Hesitancy against the COVID-19 vaccine was high due to mistrust in the medical establishment, concerns with the accelerated timeline for vaccine development, limited data on short- and long-term side effects, and the political environment promoting racial injustice. Some participants were willing to consider the vaccine once the safety profile is robust and reassuring. Receiving a recommendation to take the vaccine from a trusted healthcare provider served as a facilitator. Health beliefs identified were similar to concerns around other vaccines and included the fear of getting the infection with vaccination and preferring to improve one’s baseline physical health through alternative therapies. Conclusions We found that hesitancy of receiving the COVID-19 vaccine was high; however, provider recommendation and transparency around the safety profile might help reduce this hesitancy. Summary: In focus group discussions, hesitancy of a COVID-19 vaccine was high among black participants due to health beliefs against vaccines in general, compounded by skepticism of vaccine development during the pandemic and the political environment fostering racial injustice.

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