Misinformation versus Facts: Understanding the Influence of News Regarding COVID-19 Vaccines on Vaccine Uptake

TL;DR

This study analyzes how fact-based news and misinformation on Twitter influence COVID-19 vaccine uptake in the U.S., revealing that increased fact-related discourse correlates with decreased vaccination rates, while misinformation shows no significant effect.

Contribution

It introduces a large-scale analysis linking Twitter discourse types to actual vaccination rates using geotagged data and advanced regression methods.

Findings

Fact-related Twitter users are associated with lower vaccination rates.

Misinformation-related users show no significant impact on vaccination.

The study highlights the complex influence of online discourse on public health behaviors.

Abstract

There is a lot of fact-based information and misinformation in the online discourses and discussions about the COVID-19 vaccines. 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 U.S. from April 19 when U.S. 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. One percent increase in fact-related Twitter users is associated with an approximately 0.87 decrease (B = -0.87, SE = 0.25, 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. 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.