Under the Surface: Covid-19 Vaccine Narratives, Misinformation and Data Deficits on Social Media

"When people can't easily access reliable information around vaccines and when mistrust in actors and institutions related to vaccines is high, misinformation narratives rush in to fill the vacuum. The findings should act as a wake-up call as the world waits for a Covid-19 vaccine and sees routine immunization rates drop."

In recent years, anti-vaccine groups have exploited the participatory features and networking opportunities that social media platforms offer, and they continue to connect with people who are still undecided about vaccination. This trend has continued in the context of the quest for a vaccine against the novel coronavirus, a disease that by its very name embodies uncertainty. The information ecosystem in which people are learning and communicating about COVID-19 is characterised by what First Draft calls "data deficits" - situations in which demand for information is high, but the supply of credible information is low. These data deficits complicate efforts to accurately make sense of the development of a COVID-19 vaccine and vaccines more generally. Through a study of social media, this report details the narratives unique to 3 languages - English, French, and Spanish - and to the overarching trends across languages. In addition, it explores various features of information disorder related to vaccines.

First Draft collected 14,394,320 social media posts from Twitter, Instagram, Facebook Pages, and public Facebook Groups that included the words "vaccine" or "vaccination" in English, French, and Spanish from June 15 2020 (when attention shifted to the race to develop a COVID-19 vaccine) to September 15 2020. Because only a fraction of these posts received a serious level of engagement, the researchers pulled out this subsection of posts for deeper analysis. In addition, in order to capture organic social media conversations as opposed to media reports, they removed verified accounts from Facebook Pages and Instagram from the sample. (See the Methodology section for more information). This process resulted in a sample of 1,200 of the most engaged-with posts related to vaccines, which generated a total of 13,136,911 interactions from social media users located in 41 countries.

First Draft categorised posts according to 6 topics:

• Development, provision, and access: Posts related to the ongoing progress and challenges of vaccine development and/or those concerned with the testing (clinical trials) and provision of and public access to vaccines.
• Safety, efficacy, and necessity: Posts concerning the safety and efficacy of vaccines; content related to the perceived necessity of vaccines also falls under this topic.
• Political and economic motives: Posts related to the political and economic motives of actors (key figures, governments, institutions, corporations, etc.) involved with vaccines and their development.
• Conspiracy theory: Posts containing well-established or novel conspiracy theories involving vaccines.
• Liberty and freedom: Posts pertaining to concerns about how vaccines may affect civil liberties and personal freedom.
• Morality and religion: Posts containing moral and religious concerns around vaccines, such as their composition and the way they are tested.

Key findings include:

• Among the 1,200 posts analysed, 2 topics were dominant across all 3 language communities: "political and economic motives" and "safety and necessity".
• Some themes were unique to a specific language. For example, "liberty and freedom" was unique to English, and "morality and religion" was unique to Spanish.
• Photos and videos play an important role, accounting for 51% of all content in the dataset (which is a conservative number, as tweets with both a link and preview image were categorised as a link).
• Together, Instagram and unverified Facebook Pages accounted for 71% of the 13 million interactions (as measured by likes, shares, emoji reactions, retweets) and also accounted for 84% of the 720,916 interactions generated by conspiracy-theory-related content.
• Conspiracy theories about vaccines in general and the COVID-19 vaccine specifically play an outsized role on social media, particularly in Francophone spaces. Far from being limited to fringe groups, these conspiracy theories resonated with the "Yellow Vest" movement, libertarians, New Age groups, highly popular anti-government groups, and more conventional audiences, with key terms such as "microchipping" and "deep state" becoming increasingly popular.

Some of the tactics "bad actors" are using include:

• Data deficits around vaccine ingredients and novel vaccine technologies, such as mRNA vaccines are being filled by unreliable individual accounts and alternative news outlets that are spreading disinformation and driving down confidence in vaccines.
• Previously debunked falsehoods and conspiracy theories about vaccines and longstanding anti-vaccination narratives (e.g., the purported, but long-ago debunked, link between the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism) are reappearing.
• Bill Gates continues to play a central role in global vaccine conversations online, with suspicions about his political and economic interests and questions about his credibility and trustworthiness as a public health expert being used to undermine trust in the vaccines organisations linked to him are working to develop.
• Anti-vaccination pages, groups, and accounts are recycling news articles providing negative or ambiguous coverage of vaccines, especially where headlines might not be telling the whole story, and spinning them to fit their agenda.

The research also found that ideologically incongruous communities - Libertarians, traditional anti-vaxxers, New Age groups, QAnon adherents, and others - are uniting around safety and necessity concerns around a COVID-19 vaccine. Shared convictions around these issues, alongside opposition to mandatory vaccines, are bringing very disparate communities together to oppose a future COVID-19 vaccine.

Recommendations that emerge from the research include:

1. Do not rely on fact-checking efforts and social media platforms' content moderation policies to address data deficits; these efforts can be potentially counterproductive (e.g., by fueling anti-vaccination narratives that claim platforms are attempting a cover-up) or could encourage key vaccine communities to migrate to alternative platforms that are harder to monitor and research.
2. Develop clear, proactive, and consistent messaging to prevent the topic of poliomyelitis, and the vaccines to combat it, from developing into an even greater data deficit. (For example, several French- and English-language posts framed the World Health Organization (WHO) as having been "forced to admit" the existence of adverse effects caused by the oral polio vaccine (OPV), thereby portraying the institution as untrustworthy.)
3. Appreciate narrative (and even topic) differences across languages and regions, and respond appropriately and in a tailored fashion.
4. Foster collaboration between reliable news outlets, social media monitoring groups, and research organisations to identify and address relevant data deficits, as well as to avoid the oversupply of information on a given topic.
5. Monitor anti-immunisation narratives stemming from natural health and "New Age" online communities more closely, as many of these are being picked up by disparate communities on social media.
6. Track the development of problematic vaccine narratives over time (as anti-vaccination misinformation narratives have adapted, and will continue to adapt, to the evolving COVID-19 health crisis context) so as to inform proactive efforts at combating novel narratives and filling data deficits.
7. Use topic modeling and other machine learning technologies to enable analysis of large datasets, while still drawing on human analysis and interpretation to understand the nuanced ways in which narratives (especially image and video content) are structured and created.
8. Find a way to acknowledge people's uncertainties and fears, rather than dismiss them, and build bridges between health experts and the vaccine hesitant so as to rebuild trust in health authorities and institutions.