Rise of post-pandemic resilience across the distrust ecosystem

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how online distrust, especially regarding vaccines, has become more resilient post-pandemic by entangling multiple topics and scales, suggesting new mitigation strategies involving blended messaging.

Contribution

It uncovers the system-level resistance of the distrust ecosystem and proposes innovative mitigation approaches through 'glocal' messaging strategies.

Findings

Distrust discourse now entangles multiple topics and scales.

Current mitigation schemes are less effective due to ecosystem resistance.

Blended 'glocal' messaging can enhance mitigation effectiveness.

Abstract

Why is distrust (e.g. of medical expertise) now flourishing online despite the surge in mitigation schemes being implemented? We analyze the changing discourse in the Facebook ecosystem of approximately 100 million users who pre-pandemic were focused on (dis)trust of vaccines. We find that post-pandemic, their discourse strongly entangles multiple non-vaccine topics and geographic scales both within and across communities. This gives the current distrust ecosystem a unique system-level resistance to mitigations that target a specific topic and geographic scale -- which is the case of many current schemes due to their funding focus, e.g. local health not national elections. Backed up by detailed numerical simulations, our results reveal the following counterintuitive solutions for implementing more effective mitigation schemes at scale: shift to 'glocal' messaging by (1) blending particular sets of distinct topics (e.g. combine messaging about specific diseases with climate change) and (2) blending geographic scales.