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Due to extensive regulations, pseudoscience and accusations of censorship are increasingly used as persuasive strategies in health misinformation. How effective are these? This experiment examines the effects of pseudoscientific misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines and genetically modified organisms (GMOs) by accounting for the rhetoric of the “persecuted hero narrative” (Baker, 2022), which involves accusations of censorship against media, platforms, and governments.

This study used data from pre- and post-COVID surveys to examine vaccine attitudes in the United States. We found evidence consistent with an ideological “spillover” effect: Liberals’ attitudes became more positive towards non-COVID vaccines (flu, MMR, HPV, chickenpox) and conservatives’ attitudes became more negative.

This study explores U.S. adults’ media consumption—in terms of the average bias and reliability of the media outlets participants report referencing—and the extent to which those participants hold inaccurate beliefs about COVID-19 and vaccination. Notably, we used a novel means of capturing the (left-right) bias and reliability of audiences’ media consumption, leveraging the Ad Fontes Media ratings of 129 news sources along each dimension.

As progress on vaccine rollout in the United States slowed down in Spring 2021, it became clear that anti-vaccine information posed a public health threat. Using text data from 5,613 distinct COVID misinformation stories and 70 anti-vaccination Facebook groups, we tracked highly salient keywords regarding anti-vaccine discourse across Twitter, thousands of news websites, and the Google and Bing search engines from May through June 2021, a key period when progress on vaccinations very clearly stalled.

This paper examines how Russia tailors its vaccine propaganda to hostile and friendly audiences, like Ukraine and Serbia. Web scraping of all articles about vaccines on Russian state-owned websites from December 2020 to November 2021 provided data for quantitative topic modeling and qualitative analysis.

In the new information environment represented by the internet and social media platforms, information of public health importance is transmitted rapidly by decentralized, interpersonal networks rather than through traditional sources like public health officials or professional journalists, thus requiring a new approach to counteracting misinformation.

We review 100 articles published from 2000 to early 2020 that research aspects of vaccine hesitancy in online communication spaces and identify several gaps in the literature prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. These gaps relate to five areas: disciplinary focus; specific vaccine, condition, or disease focus; stakeholders and implications; research methodology; and geographical coverage.

Our study examines Facebook posts containing nine prominent COVID-19 vaccine misinformation topics that circulated on the platform between March 1st, 2020 and March 1st, 2021. We first identify misinformation spreaders and fact checkers,1fact checker in our study is defined as any public account (including both individual and organizational accounts) that posts factual information about COVID-19 vaccine or posts debunking information about COVID-19 vaccine misinformation.

Health experts worry that a COVID-19 vaccine boycott could inhibit reaching “herd immunity,” and their concerns have only grown as the pandemic has spread. Concern has largely focused on anti-vaccine protestors, who captured headlines as they stood side by side with Tea Party activists and armed militia groups demonstrating against the quarantine in April and May of this year.