Aggressive behaviour of anti-vaxxers and their toxic replies in English and Japanese

Miyazaki, Kunihiro; Uchiba, Takayuki; Tanaka, Kenji; Sasahara, Kazutoshi

doi:10.1057/s41599-022-01245-x

Cited by 14 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 45 publications

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“…This implies a necessity to share accurate and credible information to counter conspiracy theories. Interventions could involve measures such as altering the Twitter algorithm or engaging with anti-vaccine influencers to correct misleading narratives [6].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Social Communities are Associated with Changing Individual’s Opinion Towards COVID-19 Vaccine on Japanese Twitter

Takayasu,

WU,

Sano

et al. 2023

Preprint

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The vaccine topic has been widely discussed on Twitter since the outbreak of COVID-19. However, the dynamics of temporal opinion shifts at the individual level and the possible reasons of shifts have been little studied. In this paper, we explore the possible influence of social interactions (retweet network) on individual opinion shifts related to vaccinations based on large-scale Twitter data in Japanese. We use an opinion score to measure the dynamic changes of individual opinions and apply dynamic community detection to the retweet network to track changes of communities over time. Then, we combine dynamic opinions and evolving communities to identify the interplay between social interaction and opinion shifts. Our findings suggest that the opinion shifts could be largely influenced by the communities that users are affiliated. Specifically, if users are within the anti-vaccine community, they exhibit a significantly higher likelihood of adopting an anti-vaccine stance. Conversely, if users are linked to pro-vaccine, pet-hobby, or news communities, they exhibit a greater probability of transitioning to a pro-vaccine standpoint. By observing the temporal changes of the influence of communities, after the start of vaccination, the anti-vaccine community’s influence appears to persist with slight drop, while the influence of pro-vaccine, news and pet-hobby communities steadily increased. Our results furnish valuable insights for policymakers and healthcare professionals to better leverage social media for vaccine promotion.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…neighbors is very close to that of pairs. For these additional works, see Supplementary 1 - (6) Opinion difference between connected users.…”

Section: Data Availabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Social Communities are Associated with Changing Individual’s Opinion Towards COVID-19 Vaccine on Japanese Twitter

Takayasu,

WU,

Sano

et al. 2023

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…14 Perspective API is a free Google service developed by Jigsaw that uses a machine learning model trained on comments that were (manually) labeled as toxic or non-toxic. It has been widely used to study online abuse, harassment (Ali et al, 2021; Guimarães et al, 2020; Obadimu et al, 2019), and the anti-vaccine movement online (Miyazaki et al, 2022). Perspective API measures toxicity, severe toxicity, profanity, identity attack, insult, and threat in the given text.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Identifying Themes of Right-Wing Extremism in Hindutva Discourse on Twitter

Ghasiya,

Ahnert,

Sasahara

2023

Social Media + Society

Self Cite

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Hindutva, the core political ideology of India’s current ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), seeks to transform constitutionally secular India into a Hindu Rashtra (“Hindu nation”). Although Hindutva has all of the features of right-wing extremism (RWE), it is nevertheless viewed as an insular sociopolitical phenomenon, due to the Eurocentric nature of RWE discourse. Recent theoretical and analytical research has sought to showcase the similarity between RWE and Hindutva, but empirical research on their relationship has been largely absent. To fill this gap, in our study, we collected 15 million tweets and used network analysis to identify prominent themes of RWE—including exclusionary nationalism, conspiracy theories, and anti-minority violence and hate speech—among the supporters of Hindutva and the BJP. Furthermore, in our toxicity analysis (performed to understand which themes produced higher levels of toxicity), we found that Hindi-language tweets related to conspiracy theories and anti-minority violence or hate speech were more toxic than English-language tweets. Given that the growing global presence and normalization of RWE-based ideas and movements are sources of concern for everyone invested in the idea of liberal democratic society, our research broadens the discussion on RWE to include the Indian context and invites researchers to further investigate Hindutva from the perspective of RWE.

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“…Thus, although the use of some words has changed between the two groups, negative emotion was consistently used more by anti-vaxxers. In addition to using negative emotions in their tweets, anti-vaxxers also preferred to retweet the negative and toxic replies of others written for neutral accounts' tweets on Twitter (Miyazaki et al, 2022).…”

Section: Linguistic Patterns In the Vaccine Debatementioning

confidence: 99%

Mechanisms Driving Online Vaccine Debate During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Seckin,

Atalay,

Otenen

et al. 2024

Social Media + Society

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The prevalence of the anti-vaccine movement in today’s society has become a pressing concern, largely amplified by the dissemination of vaccine skepticism. During the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, the vaccination debate sparked controversial debates on social media platforms such as Twitter, which can lead to serious consequences for public health. What determines anti-vax attitudes is an important question for understanding the source of the campaigns and mitigating the misinformation spread. Compared with other countries, Türkiye differentiates itself with high vaccination rates and lack of political support for anti-vaxxers despite its highly polarized political system. Analyzing Turkish Twittersphere, we explore several mechanisms capturing content production and behaviors of accounts within the pro- and anti-vax segments in online vaccine-related discussions. Our findings indicate there is no relation between political stance and anti-vaccine attitude. Both supporters of vaccination (pro-vaxxers) and opponents (anti-vaxxers) can be found across the political spectrum. Moreover, linguistic differences reveal that anti-vaxxers employ more emotional language, while pro-vaxxers express more skepticism. Notably, automated accounts are less prevalent leading to difficulty in assessing genuine support for vaccines, while anti-vaccine bots produce slightly more content. These findings have crucial implications for vaccine policy, emphasizing the importance of understanding diverse language patterns and beliefs among anti-vaxxers and pro-vaxxers to develop effective communication strategies at the national level.

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Aggressive behaviour of anti-vaxxers and their toxic replies in English and Japanese

Cited by 14 publications

References 45 publications

Social Communities are Associated with Changing Individual’s Opinion Towards COVID-19 Vaccine on Japanese Twitter

Social Communities are Associated with Changing Individual’s Opinion Towards COVID-19 Vaccine on Japanese Twitter

Identifying Themes of Right-Wing Extremism in Hindutva Discourse on Twitter

Mechanisms Driving Online Vaccine Debate During the COVID-19 Pandemic

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