Vaccine discourse in white nationalist online communication: A mixed-methods computational approach

Conspiracies, misinformation and resistance to public health measures during COVID-19 in white nationalist online communication

“…Our main goal in this study is to examine a White Nationalist (WN) sub-forum dedicated to COVID-19 on the platform Stormfront, between January 2020 and December 2021. It substantially extends prior work that found very high levels of anti-scientific sentiment on Stormfront, but was limited to vaccines and was conducted before COVID-19 [10] . We believe studying the sub-forum dedicated to COVID-19 is required due to two reasons.…”

“…Sentiment was overwhelmingly negative towards both, with anti-containment posts share being 68%, and anti-vaccination share reaching 86%. These levels are not only higher than what was found in other platforms, including the high levels on Pinterest [34] , but, as hypothesized in H1, also higher than what has been found in the same forum pre-COVID [10] .…”

“…Two authors amended the codebook from Walter et al, 2022 [10] to include containment measures beyond vaccines. The revised codebook was tested using small samples of posts.…”

“…Recent studies have warned about the far-right’s use of science for justification of extremist, racist, and misogynist ideologies, which have the capacity to spill-over from fringe websites into mainstream American right-wing discourse [9] , [10] . Conspiracy theories like the Great Replacement, according to which non-white elites, including Jewish people, liberals, and feminists are working in concert to eliminate the white race and its dominance through ideologies of diversity and policies of immigration, but also the promotion of medical procedures like abortion [9] or vaccines [10] . Such conspiracies are often being used to justify extreme violent actions, including mass-shootings, but could also erode trust in science and compliance with public health efforts [11] .…”

Feeling inspired and nostalgic: associations between media context-induced positive emotions and behavioral change among vaccine-hesitant individuals in the late stages of the COVID-19 pandemic

“…Moreover, the fast production of vaccines has led to vaccine skepticism that quickly spreads on mainstream and social media (Ball, 2020). Widespread conspiracy theories also cultivate disbelief about the vaccines’ safety and efficacy (Walter et al , 2022). Amid this circumstance, anti-vaccine groups have used several strategies to promote skepticism toward public health messages (Moran et al , 2016), including the sophisticated use of social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter to convey their anti-vaccination messages (Walter et al , 2022).…”