Characterizing Vaccination Movements on YouTube in the United States and Brazil

TL;DR

This study compares pro- and anti-vaccine content on YouTube in the US and Brazil, analyzing discourse, engagement, and content removal to understand platform dynamics in vaccine misinformation during COVID-19.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of vaccine-related discourse and platform moderation effectiveness in the US and Brazil on YouTube.

Findings

American anti-vaccine content leads to more toxic discussions and higher engagement.

Pro-vaccine discourse is linked to conspiracy theories and misinformation.

Only 16% of anti-vaccine content was removed, with higher removal in the US.

Abstract

In the context of COVID-19 pandemic, social networks such as Twitter and YouTube stand out as important sources of information. 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 it 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 USA registering the highest percentage of removed anti-vaccine content(34%) and BR registering the lowest(9.8%).