There are two types of ‘superspreaders’ who spread online misinformation. organized Those who spread false information or misleading claims, or those who unknowingly share false information.
We have seen their combined effects during the COVID-19 pandemic, with some pervasive and deadly consequences, but we have not detailed how misinformation on social media changes people’s behavior, especially when it comes to vaccinations.
Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of Pennsylvania set out to connect the dots to show cause and effect, and found that among the approximately 233 million Facebook users in the U.S., more than 13,000 headlines influenced vaccination intentions. The impact was analyzed. That’s almost 70% of the country’s population.
The researchers cast a wide net and didn’t just look at content flagged by the platform’s fact-checkers as false or misleading. Their dataset included all popular vaccine-related headlines during the first three months of the U.S. vaccine rollout from January to March 2021. This includes ‘vaccine-skeptic’ information that is not factually inaccurate but still raises questions about vaccines, and is less scrutinized on social media.
“By taking an a priori agnostic view of what content can change vaccination intentions, we can discover from the bottom up what types of content are driving overall vaccine hesitancy,” MIT computational social scientist Jennifer Allen and colleagues wrote. .” he said. write for a published paper.
Based on research pointing to a link between sharing and believing misinformation online and research pointing to a link between declining COVID-19 vaccinations, many assumptions are made about the relationship between exposure to misinformation and subsequent behavior. This has been done.
But it’s a chicken and egg situation. Other studies have shown initial vaccine hesitancy. It makes people consume more misinformation.It is not misinformation that causes initial doubts to refrain from getting vaccinated.
To get to the root cause, the researchers first tested the impact of different headlines on vaccination intentions in two experiments with more than 18,700 online survey participants.
In a second experiment, they found that regardless of whether the headline was true, false, or accurate, making people believe that vaccines could be harmful to their health reduced their willingness to get vaccinated.
Next, the researchers combined crowdsourcing and machine learning to estimate the impact of approximately 13,200 popular vaccine-related URLs in early 2021, and extrapolated these results, showing cause and effect, to the pool of 233 million U.S. Facebook users. .
They found that misinformation that fact-checkers flagged as false or misleading reached more people and garnered relatively little attention on Facebook compared to unlabeled stories suggesting that vaccines are harmful to health. I did.
These unflagged articles were published primarily by trusted mainstream news outlets, were viewed hundreds of millions of times, and had about 46 times greater impact than flagged posts that left vaccine skepticism unchecked, the team’s predictive model found. appeared.
In other words, vaccine-skeptical content on mainstream sites that was not flagged as misinformation had a greater impact on vaccine hesitancy than outright false content published by fringe media outlets.
“An unmarked article highlighting rare deaths after vaccination was one of the most viewed articles on Facebook,” Allen and colleagues wrote. explainIt shows how widely people’s exposure to misleading content determines its influence.
Of course, many other practical factors may influence the decision to get vaccinated, and vaccine hesitancy may not be the only factor.
Vaccination intentions are also not the same as hard data on vaccination rates. Although this study also focuses on just one country, the results can provide insight into how information spreads globally.
“Our work suggests that while limiting the spread of misinformation has important public health benefits, it is also vitally important to consider gray area content that is actually accurate but nonetheless misleading.” conclusion.
This study science.
