Abstract
Social media platforms are information battlegrounds where actors or communities compete to influence ideas and beliefs. These platforms can benefit government and health organizations by quickly disseminating pertinent information about the COVID-19 vaccine to a large population. However, at the same time, the social-cyberspace domain has made it easy for counter-messages to gain mainstream support and widespread propagation. What were once isolated fringe groups can now distribute—on a massive scale—false healthcare narratives in the form of disinformation and conspiracy theories. Twitter is a popular online medium where COVID-19 pro- and anti-vaccine communities strive to convince large audiences of their particular stances. This chapter explores how these competing groups use different types of online manipulation techniques to spread information and influence their followers on Twitter. Using a corpus of COVID-19 tweets, we identify the key players and communities spreading the pro-vaccine- and anti-vaccine-related messages and their beliefs. We then analyze the labeled messages to determine how messages influence targets and impact the overall network using a novel influence assessment approach referred to as the BEND framework.
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Acknowledgements
The research for this chapter was supported in part by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) under grants N00014182106 and N000142112229, the Knight Foundation, the United States Army, and the Center for Informed Democracy and Social-cybersecurity (IDeaS). The views and conclusions are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the Knight Foundation, the ONR, the United States Army, or the US Government.
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Blane, J.T., Ng, L.H.X., Carley, K.M. (2023). Analyzing Social-Cyber Maneuvers for Spreading COVID-19 Pro- and Anti- Vaccine Information. In: Ginossar, T., Shah, S.F.A., Weiss, D. (eds) Vaccine Communication Online. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24490-2_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24490-2_4
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