Misinformation versus Facts: Understanding the Influence of News regarding COVID-19 Vaccines on Vaccine Uptake

Abstract

Background. There is a lot of fact-based information and misinformation in the online discourses and discussions about the COVID-19 vaccines. Method. Using a sample of nearly four million geotagged English tweets and the data from the CDC COVID Data Tracker, we conducted the Fama-MacBeth regression with the Newey-West adjustment to understand the influence of both misinformation and fact-based news on Twitter on the COVID-19 vaccine uptake in the US from April 19 when US adults were vaccine eligible to June 30, 2021, after controlling state-level factors such as demographics, education, and the pandemic severity. We identified the tweets related to either misinformation or fact-based news by analyzing the URLs. Results. One percent increase in fact-related Twitter users is associated with an approximately 0.87 decrease (B=−0.87, SE=0.25, and p<.001) in the number of daily new vaccinated people per hundred. No significant relationship was found between the percentage of fake-news-related users and the vaccination rate. Conclusion. The negative association between the percentage of fact-related users and the vaccination rate might be due to a combination of a larger user-level influence and the negative impact of online social endorsement on vaccination intent.