During the COVID-19 pandemic, different conspiracies have risen, with the most dangerous being those focusing on vaccines. Today, there exists a social media movement focused on destroying the credibility of vaccines and trying to convince people to ignore the advice of governments and health organizations on vaccination. Our aim was to analyze a COVID-19 antivaccination message campaign on Twitter that uses Spanish as the main language, to find the key elements in their communication strategy. Twitter data were retrieved from 14 to 28 December using NodeXL software. We analyzed tweets in Spanish, focusing on influential users, most influential tweets, and content analysis of tweets. The results revealed ordinary citizens who ‘offer the truth’ as the most important profile in this network. The content analysis showed antivaccine tweets (31.05%) as the most frequent. The analysis of anti-COVID19 tweets showed that attacks against vaccine safety were the most important (79.87%) but we detected a new kind of message presenting the vaccine as a means of manipulating the human genetic code (8.1%). We concluded that the antivaccine movement and its tenets have great influence in the COVID-19 negationist movement. We observed a new topic in COVID-19 vaccine hoaxes that must be considered in our fight against misinformation.

The COVID-19 pandemic has generated a great impact worldwide both on the population health but also on an economic and social level. In this health emergency, a key element has been and still is the need for information, which has become a daily concern for many people. Social media represent powerful tools for searching and gathering health-related information, thus becoming a new place where health authorities need to be present to disseminate information of preventive measures like vaccines against COVID-19, as well as try to block information against these public health measures. The main goal of this study was to analyze the role that healthcare professionals have in Twitter to support the campaign of public institutions on vaccination against COVID-19. To address this study, an analysis of the messages sent on Twitter containing the hashtag #yomevacuno, between 12 December 2020 was developed using the NodeXL software (Social Media Research Foundation, Redwood, CA, USA), focusing on content analysis of tweets and users’ accounts to identify healthcare professionals. The results show that healthcare professionals represent only 11.38% of users, being responsible for 6.35% of impressions generated by the network #yomevacuno. We can observe that traffic information generated by healthcare professionals is not significant in comparison with institutions (p = 0.633), but it is compared to common users (p = 0.0014). The most active healthcare professionals were pharmacists (40.17%), nurses (27.17%), and physicians (12.14%). Their activity (90.43% of messages) was mainly focused on sharing messages generated by other users’ accounts. From original content generated by healthcare professionals, only 78.95% had a favorable storytelling on the vaccine, but without sharing information about vaccines or vaccination. As a conclusion for this study, the participation of healthcare professionals in the dissemination and generation of information within the #yomevacuno communication strategy, led by the Spanish Ministry of Health, has been scarce. We emphasize the need to enhance communication skills in social networks to support public health campaigns through these increasingly important social media.

This study aims to analyze the role of bots in the dissemination of health information, both in favor of and opposing vaccination against COVID-19. Study design: An observational, retrospective, time-limited study was proposed, in which activity on the social network Twitter was analyzed. Methods: Data related to pro-vaccination and anti-vaccination networks were compiled from 24 December 2020 to 30 April 2021 and analyzed using the software NodeXL and Botometer. The analyzed tweets were written in Spanish, including keywords that allow identifying the message and focusing on bots’ activity and their influence on both networks. Results: In the pro-vaccination network, 404 bots were found (14.31% of the total number of users), located mainly in Chile (37.87%) and Spain (14.36%). The anti-vaccination network bots represented 16.19% of the total users and were mainly located in Spain (8.09%) and Argentina (6.25%). The pro-vaccination bots generated greater impact than bots in the anti-vaccination network (p < 0.000). With respect to the bots’ influence, the pro-vaccination network did have a significant influence compared to the activity of human users (p < 0.000). Conclusions: This study provides information on bots’ activity in pro- and anti-vaccination networks in Spanish, within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic on Twitter. It is found that bots in the pro-vaccination network influence the dissemination of the pro-vaccination message, as opposed to those in the anti-vaccination network. We consider that this information could provide guidance on how to enhance the dissemination of public health campaigns, but also to combat the spread of health misinformation on social media.

Health misinformation about nutrition and other health aspects on social media is a current public health concern. Healthcare professionals play an essential role in efforts to detect and correct it. The present study focuses on analyzing the use of competencies associated with training in methodology, health literacy, and critical lecture in order to detect sources of health misinformation that use scientific articles to support their false information. A qualitative study was conducted between 15 and 30 January 2022, wherein the participants were recruited from active users from a nutrition conversation on Twitter, diets, and cancer and defined themselves as healthcare professionals. This study demonstrates that health literacy and critical lecture competencies allow for the detection of more misinformation messages and are associated with a high rate of responses to users that spread the misinformation messages. Finally, this study proposes the necessity of developing actions to improve health literacy and critical lecture competencies between healthcare professionals. However, in order to achieve this, health authorities must develop strategies to psychologically support those healthcare professionals faced with bullying as a result of their activity on social media debunking health hoaxes.

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