NekuSoul-Lemmy
  • Communities
  • Create Post
  • heart
    Support Lemmy
  • search
    Search
  • Login
  • Sign Up
Gaywallet (they/it)@beehaw.orgM to Science@beehaw.org · 3 years ago

Analysis of 60 billion tweets has shown that social media can form an echo chamber contributing to vaccine hesitancy

journals.plos.org

external-link
message-square
0
fedilink
0
external-link

Analysis of 60 billion tweets has shown that social media can form an echo chamber contributing to vaccine hesitancy

journals.plos.org

Gaywallet (they/it)@beehaw.orgM to Science@beehaw.org · 3 years ago
message-square
0
fedilink
Characterizing polarization in online vaccine discourse—A large-scale study
journals.plos.org
external-link
Vaccine hesitancy is currently recognized by the WHO as a major threat to global health. Recently, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a growing interest in the role of social media in the propagation of false information and fringe narratives regarding vaccination. Using a sample of approximately 60 billion tweets, we conduct a large-scale analysis of the vaccine discourse on Twitter. We use methods from deep learning and transfer learning to estimate the vaccine sentiments expressed in tweets, then categorize individual-level user attitude towards vaccines. Drawing on an interaction graph representing mutual interactions between users, we analyze the interplay between vaccine stances, interaction network, and the information sources shared by users in vaccine-related contexts. We find that strongly anti-vaccine users frequently share content from sources of a commercial nature; typically sources which sell alternative health products for profit. An interesting aspect of this finding is that concerns regarding commercial conflicts of interests are often cited as one of the major factors in vaccine hesitancy. Further, we show that the debate is highly polarized, in the sense that users with similar stances on vaccination interact preferentially with one another. Extending this insight, we provide evidence of an epistemic echo chamber effect, where users are exposed to highly dissimilar sources of vaccine information, depending the vaccination stance of their contacts. Our findings highlight the importance of understanding and addressing vaccine mis- and dis-information in the context in which they are disseminated in social networks.
  • pancake@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    4 months ago

    deleted by creator

Science@beehaw.org

science@beehaw.org

Subscribe from Remote Instance

Create a post
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !science@beehaw.org

Studies, research findings, and interesting tidbits from the ever-expanding scientific world.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:

  • Space

Be sure to also check out these other Fediverse science communities:

  • https://lemmy.ml/c/science
  • https://mander.xyz/c/science

This community’s icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

Visibility: Public
globe

This community can be federated to other instances and be posted/commented in by their users.

  • 42 users / day
  • 165 users / week
  • 477 users / month
  • 2.24K users / 6 months
  • 1 local subscriber
  • 13.8K subscribers
  • 725 Posts
  • 4.19K Comments
  • Modlog
  • mods:
  • alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.org
  • Gaywallet (they/it)@beehaw.org
  • Chris Remington@beehaw.org
  • BE: 0.19.8
  • Modlog
  • Instances
  • Docs
  • Code
  • join-lemmy.org