Although billions of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered, too many people remain hesitant. Misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccines, propagating on social media, is believed to drive hesitancy towards vaccination. However, exposure to misinformation does not necessarily indicate misinformation adoption. In this paper we describe a novel framework for identifying the stance towards misinformation, relying on attitude consistency and its properties. The interactions between attitude consistency, adoption or rejection of misinformation and the content of microblogs are exploited in a novel neural architecture, where the stance towards misinformation is organized in a knowledge graph. This new neural framework is enabling the identification of stance towards misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines with state-of-the-art results. The experiments are performed on a new dataset of misinformation towards COVID-19 vaccines, called CoVaxLies, collected from recent Twitter discourse. Because CoVaxLies provides a taxonomy of the misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines, we are able to show which type of misinformation is mostly adopted and which is mostly rejected.
Billions of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered, but many remain hesitant. Misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccines and other vaccines, propagating on social media, is believed to drive hesitancy towards vaccination. The ability to automatically recognize misinformation targeting vaccines on Twitter depends on the availability of data resources. In this paper we present VaccineLies, a large collection of tweets propagating misinformation about two vaccines: the COVID-19 vaccines and the Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines. Misinformation targets are organized in vaccine-specific taxonom…
Enormous hope in the efficacy of vaccines became recently a successful reality in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. However, vaccine hesitancy, fueled by exposure to social media misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines became a major hurdle. Therefore, it is essential to automatically detect where misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines on social media is spread and what kind of misinformation is discussed, such that inoculation interventions can be delivered at the right time and in the right place, in addition to interventions designed to address vaccine hesitancy. This paper is address…
University of California, Davis（加州大学戴维斯分校）；Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）
Sharing of anti-vaccine posts on social media, including misinformation posts, has been shown to create confusion and reduce the publics confidence in vaccines, leading to vaccine hesitancy and resistance. Recent years have witnessed the fast rise of such anti-vaccine posts in a variety of linguistic and visual forms in online networks, posing a great challenge for effective content moderation and tracking. Extending previous work on leveraging textual information to understand vaccine information, this paper presents Insta-VAX, a new multi-modal dataset consisting of a sample of 64,957 Instag…
University of Melbourne（墨尔本大学）；Curtin University（科廷大学）
Developing an understanding of the public discourse on COVID-19 vaccination on social media is important not only for addressing the current COVID-19 pandemic, but also for future pathogen outbreaks. We examine a Twitter dataset containing 75 million English tweets discussing COVID-19 vaccination from March 2020 to March 2021. We train a stance detection algorithm using natural language processing (NLP) techniques to classify tweets as `anti-vax' or `pro-vax', and examine the main topics of discourse using topic modelling techniques. While pro-vax tweets (37 million) far outnumbered anti-vax t…
Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccines have been an important topic in public discourse. The discussions around vaccines are polarized as some see them as an important measure to end the pandemic, and others are hesitant or find them harmful. This study investigates posts related to COVID-19 vaccines on Twitter and focuses on those which have a negative stance toward vaccines. A dataset of 16,713,238 English tweets related to COVID-19 vaccines was collected covering the period from March 1, 2020, to July 31, 2021. We used the Scikit-learn Python library to apply a support vector ma…
Bredesen Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Graduate Education, University of Tennessee at Knoxville（田纳西大学诺克斯维尔分校布雷德森跨学科研究与研究生教育中心）；Center for Biomedical Informatics, Department of Pediatrics, College of Medicine, University of Tennessee Health Science Center（田纳西大学健康科学中心医学院儿科系生物医学信息学中心）；Hubert Department of Global Health, Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University（埃默里大学罗林斯公共卫生学院休伯特全球卫生系）
This study investigated and compared public sentiment related to COVID-19 vaccines expressed on two popular social media platforms, Reddit and Twitter, harvested from January 1, 2020, to March 1, 2022. To accomplish this task, we created a fine-tuned DistilRoBERTa model to predict sentiments of approximately 9.5 million Tweets and 70 thousand Reddit comments. To fine-tune our model, our team manually labeled the sentiment of 3600 Tweets and then augmented our dataset by the method of back-translation. Text sentiment for each social media platform was then classified with our fine-tuned model u…
Optimizing Social Media Annotation of HPV Vaccine Skepticism and Misinformation Using Large Language Models: An Experimental Evaluation of In-Context Learning and Fine-Tuning Stance Detection Across Multiple Models
School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Wisconsin–Madison（威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校新闻与大众传播学院）；Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Wisconsin–Madison（威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校电气与计算机工程系）；Department of Computer Science, University of Wisconsin–Madison（威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校计算机科学系）；Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin–Madison（威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校心理学系）；School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院交互计算学院）；Institute of People and Technology, Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院人与技术研究所）
University of Exeter（埃克塞特大学）；University of Kansas（堪萨斯大学）
Monitoring social discourse about COVID-19 vaccines is key to understanding how large populations perceive vaccination campaigns. We focus on 4765 unique popular tweets in English or Italian about COVID-19 vaccines between 12/2020 and 03/2021. One popular English tweet was liked up to 495,000 times, stressing how popular tweets affected cognitively massive populations. We investigate both text and multimedia in tweets, building a knowledge graph of syntactic/semantic associations in messages including visual features and indicating how online users framed social discourse mostly around the log…
Malicious accounts spreading misinformation has led to widespread false and misleading narratives in recent times, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, and social media platforms struggle to eliminate these contents rapidly. This is because adapting to new domains requires human intensive fact-checking that is slow and difficult to scale. To address this challenge, we propose to leverage news-source credibility labels as weak labels for social media posts and propose model-guided refinement of labels to construct large-scale, diverse misinformation labeled datasets in new domains. The weak…
Just as Humans Need Vaccines, So Do Models: Model Immunization to Combat Falsehoods
Vector Institute（向量研究所）；University of Central Florida（中佛罗里达大学）；University of Cincinnati（辛辛那提大学）；Independent Researcher（独立研究员）；University of Groningen（格罗宁根大学）
University of Birmingham（伯明翰大学）；De La Salle University（德拉萨大学）
Vaccine hesitancy and other COVID-19-related concerns and complaints in the Philippines are evident on social media. It is important to identify these different topics and sentiments in order to gauge public opinion, use the insights to develop policies, and make necessary adjustments or actions to improve public image and reputation of the administering agency and the COVID-19 vaccines themselves. This paper proposes a semi-supervised machine learning pipeline to perform topic modeling, sentiment analysis, and an analysis of vaccine brand reputation to obtain an in-depth understanding of nati…
Clarifying Misconceptions in COVID-19 Vaccine Sentiment and Stance Analysis and Their Implications for Vaccine Hesitancy Mitigation: A Systematic Review
University of São Paulo（圣保罗大学）；University of Birmingham（伯明翰大学）；University of Rio de Janeiro State（里约热内卢州立大学）
Maharaja Surajmal Institute of Technology, GGSIPU（马哈拉贾苏拉杰马尔技术学院，GGSIPU）；Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology Delhi（德里英德拉普拉斯塔信息技术学院）；All India Institute of Medical Sciences（全印度医学科学学院）
Social media plays a pivotal role in disseminating news globally and acts as a platform for people to express their opinions on various topics. A wide variety of views accompanies COVID-19 vaccination drives across the globe, often colored by emotions, which change along with rising cases, approval of vaccines, and multiple factors discussed online. This study aims at analyzing the temporal evolution of different Emotion categories: Hesitation, Rage, Sorrow, Anticipation, Faith, and Contentment with Influencing Factors: Vaccine Rollout, Misinformation, Health Effects, and Inequities as lexical…
Media Bias Matters: Understanding the Impact of Politically Biased News on Vaccine Attitudes in Social Media
School of Computing and AI, Arizona State University（亚利桑那州立大学计算与人工智能学院）；Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois Chicago（芝加哥伊利诺伊大学计算机科学系）；ByteDance Research（字节跳动研究院）
The outbreak of the infectious and fatal disease COVID-19 has revealed that pandemics assail public health in two waves: first, from the contagion itself and second, from plagues of suspicion and stigma. Now, we have in our hands and on our phones an outbreak of moral controversy. Modern dependency on social medias has not only facilitated access to the locations of vaccine clinics and testing sites but also-and more frequently-to the convoluted explanations of how "COVID-19 was a FIFA conspiracy"[1]. The MIT Media Lab finds that false news "diffuses significantly farther, faster, deeper, and …
University of Tartu（塔尔图大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）
In this work, we collect a moderate-sized representative corpus of tweets (200,000 approx.) pertaining Covid-19 vaccination spanning over a period of seven months (September 2020 - March 2021). Following a Transfer Learning approach, we utilize the pre-trained Transformer-based XLNet model to classify tweets as Misleading or Non-Misleading and validate against a random subset of results manually. We build on this to study and contrast the characteristics of tweets in the corpus that are misleading in nature against non-misleading ones. This exploratory analysis enables us to design features (s…
The COVID-19 pandemic has introduced new opportunities for health communication, including an increase in the public use of online outlets for health-related emotions. People have turned to social media networks to share sentiments related to the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper we examine the role of social messaging shared by Persons in the Public Eye (i.e. athletes, politicians, news personnel) in determining overall public discourse direction. We harvested approximately 13 million tweets ranging from 1 January 2020 to 1 March 2022. The sentiment was calculated for each tweet…
