Not just conspiracy theories: Vaccine opponents and proponents add to the COVID-19 ‘infodemic’ on Twitter

Abstract

In February 2020, the World Health Organization announced an ‘infodemic’—a deluge of both accurate and inaccurate health information—that accompanied the global pandemic of COVID-19 as a major challenge to effective health communication. We assessed content from the most active vaccine accounts on Twitter to understand how existing online communities contributed to the ‘infodemic’ during the early stages of the pandemic.

Keywords

• conspiracy theories
• covid-19
• public health
• twitter
• vaccines