Characterizing Vaccination Movements on YouTube in the United States and Brazil

Abstract

In the context of COVID-19 pandemic, social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram stand out as important sources of information. Among those, YouTube, as the largest and most engaging online media consumption platform, has a large influence in the spread of information and misinformation, which makes it important to study how the platform deals with the problems that arise from disinformation, as well as how its users interact with different types of content. Considering that United States (USA) and Brazil (BR) are two countries with the highest COVID-19 death tolls, we asked the following question: What are the nuances of vaccination campaigns in the two countries? With that in mind, we engage in a comparative analysis of pro and anti-vaccine movements on YouTube. We also investigate the role of YouTube in countering online vaccine misinformation in USA and BR. For this means, we monitored the removal of vaccine related content on the platform and also applied various techniques to analyze the differences in discourse and engagement in pro and anti-vaccine "comment sections". We found that American anti-vaccine content tend to lead to considerably more toxic and negative discussion than their pro-vaccine counterparts while also leading to 18% higher user-user engagement, while Brazilian anti-vaccine content was significantly less engaging. We also found that pro-vaccine and anti-vaccine discourses are considerably different as the former is associated with conspiracy theories (e.g. ccp), misinformation and alternative medicine (e.g. hydroxychloroquine), while the latter is associated with protective measures. Finally, it was observed that YouTube content removals are still insufficient, with only approximately 16% of the anti-vaccine content being removed by the end of the studied period, with the United States registering the highest percentage of removed anti-vaccine content(34%) and Brazil registering the lowest(9.8%).CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in collaborative and social computing.

Less reliable media drive interest in anti-vaccine information

“…By one calculation, social media accounts held by so-called anti-vaxxers increased their following by at least 7.8 million from 2019 to 2020, 1 million people follow anti-vaccine groups on Facebook, and 17 million people subscribe to similar accounts on YouTube (Burki, 2020). Social media companies such as YouTube took actions to remove anti-vaccine content, though some work found that only a small portion of anti-vaccine videos were being removed (Locatelli et al, 2022).…”

Subscriptions and external links help drive resentful users to alternative and extremist YouTube channels

“…These findings demonstrate the scientific contribution made by our study. They also highlight that YouTube remains a key hosting provider for alternative and extremist channels, helping them continue to profit from their audience (28,29) and reinforcing concerns about lax content moderation on the platform (30).…”

The Influence of Toxic Trolling Comments on Anti-vaccine YouTube Videos

“…Moreover, comments on online content are known to shape viewers' perceptions of the content itself [16,17]. However, the comment section is often plagued by uncivil comments [18][19][20], particularly on anti-vaccine videos [21]. Empirical and quantitative evidence of the influence of toxic comments on other users would provide valuable insights for social media platforms to effectively moderate content and maintain a safe and informative environment.…”