We found that that following, retweeting, or favoriting low-quality news sources – and being central in a US conservative Twitter network – is associated with vaccine hesitancy (n = 2,064).
doi.org/10.1093/pnasne…
There has been speculation that an “infodemic” of misinformation on social media is contributing to vaccine hesitancy.
We set out to test how one’s online information diet is associated with vaccine hesitancy by linking survey data to Twitter data.
Our meta-analysis of all publicly available data on the "accuracy nudge" intervention found that accuracy nudges have little to no effect for US conservatives and Republicans. (1/9)
In our recent @PNASNews paper, we suggested that Facebook's algorithm change in 2018, which gave more weight to reactions/comments, was rewarding posts expressing out-group animosity.
Recent reporting from the @WSJ finds that @Facebook was aware of this issue.
In our paper, we found that posts about the political outgroup (which tend to be very negative) receive much more overall engagement -- particularly in the form of "angry" reactions, "haha" reactions, comments and shares.
Analyzing social media posts from news accounts and politicians (n = 2,730,215), we found that the biggest predictor of "virality" (out of all predictors we measured) was whether a social media post was about one's outgroup.
pnas.org/content/118/26…
Specifically, each additional word about the opposing party (e.g., “Democrat,” “Leftist,” or “Biden” if the post was coming from a Republican) in a social media post increased the odds of that post being shared by 67%.
May 10, 2021 • 7 tweets • 4 min read
Have you shared fake news on Twitter? I designed an app that will tell you!
It will also tell you how many right-leaning, left-leaning, or hyper-partisan/low-quality news sites you have shared.