Abstract
With the problem of disinformation becoming more apparent, one of the current topics for disinformation campaigns is the COVID-19 vaccine, which has broad implications for public health. This research was conducted to investigate a possible connection between the amount of vaccination-related disinformation and the willingness among the Dutch population to get vaccinated. The contribution of this research is 1) developing a tool-supported approach to identify words and bigrams used in alternative news outlet, 2) classifying disinformation-related vocabulary, 3) applying the approach that relates disinformation and vaccination willingness in the context of the COVID pandemic, highlighting its strengths and limitations. We conceptualised vaccination disinformation, expressed it in certain’trigger terms’ and plotted the popularity of those terms amongst Dutch Internet users over time, using Google Trends and Twitter data. Using a linear regression model, we combined this with vaccination willingness studies of June through December of 2020 to investigate a possible correlation. Our results, while not statistically significant, did point towards a negative relationship between disinformation spread and willingness to vaccinate. Further research, utilizing similar approach and additional available information on vaccination willingness, may provide more insight on disinformation spread and vaccination willingness across the world.
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Notes
- 1.
https://doi.org/10.4121/14714031 - dataset in the 4TU.Research Data repository, containing supporting material, (non-copyrighted) data and code used for this study, with its documentation.
- 2.
Recently, the Dutch government released a dataset on vaccination willingness, which is not compatible with the data set initially used in this study, as the questions asked to members of the public differed, and the time coverage was not suitable for our research: https://coronadashboard.government.nl/verantwoording#willingness-to-be-vaccinated.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Nicolas Dintzner for his assistance with the data management, proofreading, and general support, Digital Competence Centre of TU Delft for their help with making code F.A.I.R., and the reviewers for their valuable comments. This work has been supported by the European Commission through the H2020 program in project CyberSec4Europe (Grant No. #830929). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of their host institutions or the European Commission.
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Kadenko, N.I., van der Boon, J.M., van der Kaaij, J., Kobes, W.J., Mulder, A.T., Sonneveld, J.J. (2021). Whose Agenda Is It Anyway? The Effect of Disinformation on COVID-19 Vaccination Hesitancy in the Netherlands. In: Edelmann, N., et al. Electronic Participation. ePart 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12849. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82824-0_5
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