Anti-vaccination views pervade online social media, fueling distrust in scientific expertise and increasing vaccine-hesitant individuals. While previous studies focused on specific countries, the COVID-19 pandemic brought the vaccination discourse worldwide, underpinning the need to tackle low-credible information flows on a global scale to design effective countermeasures. Here, we leverage 316 million vaccine-related Twitter messages in 18 languages, from October 2019 to March 2021, to quantify misinformation flows between users exposed to anti-vaccination (no-vax) content. We find that, during the pandemic, no-vax communities became more central in the country-specific debates and their cross-border connections strengthened, revealing a global Twitter anti-vaccination network. U.S. users are central in this network, while Russian users also become net exporters of misinformation during vaccination roll-out. Interestingly, we find that Twitter's content moderation efforts, and in particular the suspension of users following the January 6th U.S. Capitol attack, had a worldwide impact in reducing misinformation spread about vaccines. These findings may help public health institutions and social media platforms to mitigate the spread of health-related, low-credible information by revealing vulnerable online communities.
翻译:预防接种观点渗透到网上社交媒体,助长了对科学专门知识的不信任,并增加了疫苗感染者的人数。虽然以前的研究侧重于特定国家,但COVID-19大流行使疫苗接种讨论遍及全球,支持需要在全球范围内应对低可信信息流动,以设计有效的应对措施。在这里,我们利用2019年10月至2021年3月18种语言的3.16亿个与疫苗有关的推特信息,以量化接触抗接种(无疫苗)内容的用户之间的错误信息流。我们发现,在这一流行病期间,无输血社区在具体国家的辩论中变得更加重要,其跨界联系得到加强,暴露出一个全球Twitter抗接种网络。美国用户是这个网络的中心,而俄罗斯用户在疫苗推出期间也成为错误信息的净输出者。有趣的是,我们发现Twitter的内容温和努力,特别是1月6日美国国会袭击后用户的暂停使用,对减少疫苗的错误信息传播产生了全球影响。这些发现可能有助于公共卫生机构和社会媒体平台减少与健康有关的脆弱、低比例的在线信息传播。