Quantifying the impact of misinformation and vaccine-skeptical content on Facebook.

Publisher: American Association for the Advancement of Science Country of Publication: United States NLM ID: 0404511 Publication Model: Print-Electronic Cited Medium: Internet ISSN: 1095-9203 (Electronic) Linking ISSN: 00368075 NLM ISO Abbreviation: Science Subsets: MEDLINE

Publication: : Washington, DC : American Association for the Advancement of Science
Original Publication: New York, N.Y. : [s.n.] 1880-

Communication* ; COVID-19 Vaccines*/immunology ; Social Media* ; Vaccination Hesitancy*/psychology; Humans ; COVID-19/prevention & control ; Crowdsourcing ; Intention ; Machine Learning ; United States ; Vaccination/psychology

Low uptake of the COVID-19 vaccine in the US has been widely attributed to social media misinformation. To evaluate this claim, we introduce a framework combining lab experiments (total N = 18,725), crowdsourcing, and machine learning to estimate the causal effect of 13,206 vaccine-related URLs on the vaccination intentions of US Facebook users ( N ≈ 233 million). We estimate that the impact of unflagged content that nonetheless encouraged vaccine skepticism was 46-fold greater than that of misinformation flagged by fact-checkers. Although misinformation reduced predicted vaccination intentions significantly more than unflagged vaccine content when viewed, Facebook users' exposure to flagged content was limited. In contrast, unflagged stories highlighting rare deaths after vaccination were among Facebook's most-viewed stories. Our work emphasizes the need to scrutinize factually accurate but potentially misleading content in addition to outright falsehoods.

Comment in: Science. 2024 May 31;384(6699):959-960. doi: 10.1126/science.adp9117. (PMID: 38815042)

0 (COVID-19 Vaccines)

Date Created: 20240530 Date Completed: 20240530 Latest Revision: 20240612

20240613

10.1126/science.adk3451

38815040