Social media behavior is associated with vaccine hesitancy.

ABSTRACT: Understanding how vaccine hesitancy relates to online behavior is crucial for addressing current and future disease outbreaks. We combined survey data measuring attitudes toward the COVID-19 vaccine with Twitter data in two studies (N ₁ = 464 Twitter users, N ₂ = 1,600 Twitter users) with preregistered hypotheses to examine how real-world social media behavior is associated with vaccine hesitancy in the United States (US) and the United Kingdom (UK). In Study 1, we found that following the accounts of US Republican politicians or hyper-partisan/low-quality news sites were associated with lower confidence in the COVID-19 vaccine-even when controlling for key demographics such as self-reported political ideology and education. US right-wing influencers (e.

SUBMITTER: Rathje S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9802475 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature