When Politicians Meet Experts: Disinformation on Twitter About Covid-19 Vaccination

Abstract

The Covid-19 vaccination has meant a huge challenge for crisis communication. After months of lockdowns, mass vaccination was a silver lining moment, but it was under threat from disinformation boosted by misinformation on social media. This research explores how opinion leaders among political leaders and health experts used Twitter to create and manage messages about the vaccination process. Specifically, we show the issues (issue frame) and strategies (game frame) applied by these actors. This study employs a corpus on the words “Covid-19” and “vaccines” used on Twitter by the heads of government and 10 recognized health experts (two for each country) in the US, the UK, France, Portugal, and Spain. We also analyze the accounts of fact-checking projects on those countries (@PolitiFact, @FullFact, @decodeurs, @JornalPoligrafo, and @maldita). The sample allows the comparison of countries with different political cultures that participated differently in the production of vaccines. The data were captured from the beginning of the vaccination drive (December 14th, 2020) until most of the population above 60 were vaccinated (May 14th, 2021). A manual content analysis was performed on the tweets (n = 2,607). The results illustrate that the politicians mostly disagreed with experts regarding issues and strategies. This finding can foster distrust in the elites and, therefore, threatens the long-term success of a public health campaign. Our study contributes to discussions on the role of networks for social cohesion, arguing that the public conversation on Twitter about the vaccination has revealed high levels of controversy.

The Internet as a social institution: Rethinking concepts for family scholarship

“…Further, state actors engage in state-and nation-building and political propaganda in digital spaces (Perez-Curiel et al, 2022). For example, Donald Trump used Twitter to drown out deliberative discourse through a populist and confrontational tweeting style that embraced racist and sexist language (Pain and Chen 2019).…”

“…During COVID-19, many politicians promoted anti-vaccination by repeatedly tweeting their disagreement with experts on Covid issues and vaccination strategies, contributing to high levels of controversy (Perez-Curiel et al, 2022).…”

“…As hybridity of state power expands into civil justice cases, family legal issues, such as child support, custodial, and child protective service cases could negatively impact outcomes for impoverished or fragile families. State actors and everyday users also engage in state‐ and nation‐building and political propaganda in digital spaces (Perez‐Curiel et al, 2022). Both use and contend with the state's political ideologies on issues surrounding normative understandings of family, reproductive justice, citizenship, and national belonging through digital interactions, conversations, and behaviors (Haman & Skolnik, 2021; Longo, 2018).…”