Inside Science May 13, 2020
Social media platforms have removed the video for violating misinformation policies, but the 26-minute video highlights one way that the anti-vaccine movement is feeding into the recent surge of misinformation and disinformation swirling around COVID-19. In a new analysis researchers at Johns Hopkins University provide the first map of how three types of online communities interact: those who promote accurate information about vaccines, those who are against vaccines, and those who are interested in vaccines but don’t obviously lean in either direction, whom the researchers termed undecided. They found that pro-vaccine pages were not well connected, relegated away from the network’s central hub, where anti-vaccine pages mingled with undecided pages. Although anti-vaccine pages represent only 4.2 million total users compared to the 6.9 million pro-vaccine users…read more.
Blue represents pages expressing pro-vaccine sentiments, red represents pages expressing anti-vaccine sentiments, and green represents pages that are interested in vaccines, but do not lean in either direction. Credits: N. Velasquez and N.F. Johnson