TY - JOUR
T1 - Vaccination trials on hold
T2 - malicious and low credibility content on Twitter during the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine development
AU - Horawalavithana, Sameera
AU - De Silva, Ravindu
AU - Weerasekara, Nipuna
AU - Kin Wai, N G
AU - Nabeel, Mohamed
AU - Abayaratna, Buddhini
AU - Elvitigala, Charitha
AU - Wijesekera, Primal
AU - Iamnitchi, Adriana
N1 - © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2022, Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
PY - 2022/11/28
Y1 - 2022/11/28
N2 - The development of COVID-19 vaccines during the global pandemic that started in 2020 was marked by uncertainty and misinformation reflected also on social media. This paper provides a quantitative evaluation of the Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) shared on Twitter around the clinical trials of the AstraZeneca vaccine and their temporary interruption in September 2020. We analyzed URLs cited in Twitter messages before and after the temporary interruption of the vaccine development on September 9, 2020 to investigate the presence of low credibility and malicious information. We show that the halt of the AstraZeneca clinical trials prompted tweets that cast doubt, fear and vaccine opposition. We discovered a strong presence of URLs from low credibility or malicious websites, as classified by independent fact-checking organizations or identified by web hosting infrastructure features. Moreover, we identified what appears to be coordinated operations to artificially promote some of these URLs hosted on malicious websites.
AB - The development of COVID-19 vaccines during the global pandemic that started in 2020 was marked by uncertainty and misinformation reflected also on social media. This paper provides a quantitative evaluation of the Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) shared on Twitter around the clinical trials of the AstraZeneca vaccine and their temporary interruption in September 2020. We analyzed URLs cited in Twitter messages before and after the temporary interruption of the vaccine development on September 9, 2020 to investigate the presence of low credibility and malicious information. We show that the halt of the AstraZeneca clinical trials prompted tweets that cast doubt, fear and vaccine opposition. We discovered a strong presence of URLs from low credibility or malicious websites, as classified by independent fact-checking organizations or identified by web hosting infrastructure features. Moreover, we identified what appears to be coordinated operations to artificially promote some of these URLs hosted on malicious websites.
U2 - 10.1007/s10588-022-09370-3
DO - 10.1007/s10588-022-09370-3
M3 - Article
C2 - 36466588
SP - 1
EP - 22
JO - Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory
JF - Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory
SN - 1381-298X
ER -