Text Analytics of Vaccine Myths on Reddit

Problem Statement

Social media platforms have contributed to the propagation of vaccine misinformation significantly and subsequently fueled the pervasiveness of vaccine hesitancy, which has become a serious threat to public health. As stated by the WHO, the ongoing COVID-19 outbreak and its response have brought along an info-demic: “an overabundance of information – some accurate and some not – that makes it hard for people to find trustworthy sources and reliable guidance when they need it” (Understanding the Infodemic and Misinformation in the Fight Against COVID-19, 2020). The exponential information growth surrounding vaccines has been accompanied by misinformation and myths, along with manipulation of information with malicious intent. A report by the Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) had condemned social media giants including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube for allowing anti-vaccine movements to remain active on their platforms and failing to implement policies that were put in place to prevent the propagation of vaccine misinformation (Nogara et al., 2022). As such, the number of followers for anti-vaccine social media pages and advocates has increased by millions particularly after the outbreak of COVID-19. Another study by Johnson (2020) has found that the undecided population in issues of contention surrounding vaccine are more connected to the anti-vaccination voices on Facebook, and predicted that if such situation remains uncontrolled, the anti-vaccination movement could overwhelm pro-vaccination voices on online platforms. If that came to pass, the consequences would be even more detrimental than what is currently being observed for the COVID-19 pandemic. As such, partnerships and collaborations need to be established to develop more effective global resources for fact-checking and misinformation management, knowledge translation, community engagement, and amplification of information. Such efforts require extensive natural language processing (NLP) techniques to dissect massive volumes of unstructured data in order to obtain meaningful and actionable insights.