There are two types of 'superspreaders' of online misinformation: the and spreaders of falsehoods or misleading claims, and those who unwittingly share information they . We've of their combined effect running rife during the , but have far less detail on how eyeing such misinformation on social media changes people's behavior, particularly around vaccination. Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of Pennsylvania set out to connect the dots to show cause and effect, analyzing the impact of more than 13,000 headlines on vaccination intentions among roughly 233 million US-based Facebook users – a pool equivalent to nearly 70 percent of the country's population.
Casting a wide net, the researchers didn't just look at content flagged as false or misleading by the platform's fact-checkers; their dataset included all vaccine-related headlines popular during the first three months of the US vaccine rollout, from January to March 2021. This included 'vaccine skeptical' information, which isn't factually inaccurate but still raises questions about vaccines, and is far less scrutinized on social media. "By taking an a priori agnostic view of what content might change vaccination intentions, we discover from the bottom-up which types of content drive overall vaccine hesitancy," MIT computational social scientist Jennifer Allen and colleagues .
Many assumptions have been made about the relationship between exposure to misinformation and resulting.
