{"title":"Misinformation versus Facts: Understanding the Influence of News regarding COVID-19 Vaccines on Vaccine Uptake.","authors":"Hanjia Lyu, Zihe Zheng, Jiebo Luo","doi":"10.34133/2022/9858292","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><strong>Background: </strong>There is a lot of fact-based information and misinformation in the online discourses and discussions about the COVID-19 vaccines.</p><p><strong>Method: </strong>Using a sample of nearly four million geotagged English tweets and the data from the CDC COVID Data Tracker, we conducted the Fama-MacBeth regression with the Newey-West adjustment to understand the influence of both misinformation and fact-based news on Twitter on the COVID-19 vaccine uptake in the US from April 19 when US adults were vaccine eligible to June 30, 2021, after controlling state-level factors such as demographics, education, and the pandemic severity. We identified the tweets related to either misinformation or fact-based news by analyzing the URLs.</p><p><strong>Results: </strong>One percent increase in fact-related Twitter users is associated with an approximately 0.87 decrease (<i>B</i> = -0.87, SE = 0.25, and <i>p</i> < .001) in the number of daily new vaccinated people per hundred. No significant relationship was found between the percentage of fake-news-related users and the vaccination rate.</p><p><strong>Conclusion: </strong>The negative association between the percentage of fact-related users and the vaccination rate might be due to a combination of a larger user-level influence and the negative impact of online social endorsement on vaccination intent.</p>","PeriodicalId":73207,"journal":{"name":"Health data science","volume":" ","pages":"9858292"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2022-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9629683/pdf/","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Health data science","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.34133/2022/9858292","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"2022/1/1 0:00:00","PubModel":"eCollection","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Background: There is a lot of fact-based information and misinformation in the online discourses and discussions about the COVID-19 vaccines.
Method: Using a sample of nearly four million geotagged English tweets and the data from the CDC COVID Data Tracker, we conducted the Fama-MacBeth regression with the Newey-West adjustment to understand the influence of both misinformation and fact-based news on Twitter on the COVID-19 vaccine uptake in the US from April 19 when US adults were vaccine eligible to June 30, 2021, after controlling state-level factors such as demographics, education, and the pandemic severity. We identified the tweets related to either misinformation or fact-based news by analyzing the URLs.
Results: One percent increase in fact-related Twitter users is associated with an approximately 0.87 decrease (B = -0.87, SE = 0.25, and p < .001) in the number of daily new vaccinated people per hundred. No significant relationship was found between the percentage of fake-news-related users and the vaccination rate.
Conclusion: The negative association between the percentage of fact-related users and the vaccination rate might be due to a combination of a larger user-level influence and the negative impact of online social endorsement on vaccination intent.