Characterizing Vaccination Movements on YouTube in the United States and Brazil
Marcelo Sartori Locatelli, Josemar Caetano, Wagner Meira Jr., Virgilio, Almeida

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…
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