Desinformación y vacunas en redes: Comportamiento de los bulos en Twitter

José-Manuel Noguera-Vivo; María del Mar Grandío-Pérez; Guillermo Villar-Rodríguez; Alejandro Martín; David Camacho

doi:10.4185/RLCS-2023-1820

Authors

José Manuel Noguera Universidad Católica de Murcia https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7189-7017
María del Mar Grandío Pérez Universidad de Murcia https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2577-4059
Guillermo Villar-Rodríguez Universidad Politécnica de Madrid https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7942-2879
Alejandro Martín Universidad Politécnica de Madrid https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0800-7632
David Camacho Universidad Politécnica de Madrid https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5051-3475

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.4185/RLCS-2023-1820

Keywords:

disinformation, hoaxes, vaccines, Twitter, artificial intelligence, health information, Spain

Abstract

Introduction: Anti-vaccine hoaxes are a highly dangerous type of health misinformation, given their direct effects on society. Although there is relevant research on typology of hoaxes, denialist discourses on networks or about the popularity of vaccines, this study provides a complementary and new vision, focused on the anti-vaccine discourse of COVID-19 on Twitter from the perspective of the behavior of the accounts that spread disinformation. Methodology: Using the FacTeR-Check method, with five phases and a first sample of a hundred hoaxes (December 2020 and September 2021), 220,246 tweets were downloaded, filtered to work with AI and natural language inference techniques (NLI) on a second sample of more than 36,000 tweets (N=36,292). Results: The results offer predominance of some types of disinformation production, as well as the effectiveness of creating false original content to gather followers or the identification of a period (2013-2020) of more domination of users who support hoaxes, compared to those who deny it. Discussion: The article shows how the typology of the accounts can be a predictive factor about the behavior of users who spread disinformation. Conclusions: Similar behavioral patterns of anti-vaccine discourse on Twitter are offered, which can help manage future similar phenomena. Given the significant size of the sample and the techniques used, it can be concluded that this work establishes a solid foundation for other comparative studies on disinformation and health in social networks.

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Author Biographies

José Manuel Noguera, Universidad Católica de Murcia

Associate Professor at the Universidad Católica de Murcia (UCAM), where he is a researcher in the area of Journalism and directs the Department of Communication Sciences. At this same institution, he is the Chief Researcher of the “Comunicación, Política e Imagen” research group. With more than half a hundred publications on digital journalism, participation, and social networks, his research focuses on the intersection between media, technology, and society. He has been a postdoctoral fellow at The University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada), as well as a guest researcher at several universities and conferences. He is currently responsible in Spain for the Online News Association (ONA). Among his latest publications, it is worth highlighting the book Hate Speech and Polarization in Participatory Society (Routledge, 2022).

María del Mar Grandío Pérez, Universidad de Murcia

Associate Professor at the Universidad de Murcia, she is part of the Spanish Management Committee of the European COST Action INDCOR (Interactive Narrative Design for Complexity Representations, 2019-2023), as she was previously of another COST, Transforming Audiences, Transforming Societies (2010 -2014). She received the Knowledge Transfer Award from the Universidad de Murcia in 2017, she has carried out research stays at the University of Missouri, University of California, University of Maryland, and Georgetown, among other institutions. Her lines of research focus on entertainment content and audience studies, having scientific publications in journals such as The International Journal of Audience Research or Media Studies, among others.

Guillermo Villar-Rodríguez, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid

Postgraduate researcher associated with the project on disinformation CIVIC (Intelligent Characterization of the Accuracy of Information related to COVID-19 by its acronym in Spanish) and doctoral student in the area of computing at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. After obtaining his master's degree in data journalism, he worked at the RTVE LAB and the newspaper El País, where he consolidated his specialization in the area. He received the Extraordinary Award for Career in Journalism and studied an official master's degree in data science and society in the Netherlands to bring computational techniques to journalistic practice. His latest publications analyze automated verification practices through natural language processing and the forms of production and dissemination of hoaxes around COVID-19 on Twitter.

Alejandro Martín, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid

Assistant Professor at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, his main areas of interest are deep learning, modeled language, cybersecurity, and natural language processing. He has been a guest researcher at the University of Kent (UK) and the Universidad de Córdoba. Besides being a lecturer, reviewer, and organizer of numerous international congresses, he is the Chief Researcher of the Intelligent Characterization of the Accuracy of Information related to COVID-19 (CIVIC) project, financed by the Fundación BBVA within the call for research teams on SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 (2021-2022). He has published in journals such as Communication & Society, Information Fusion, and Applied Soft Computing, among others.

David Camacho, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid

Full Professor of the Department of Information Systems at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid and Chief Researcher of the Applied Intelligence and Data Analysis Group (AIDA). His main areas of interest are disinformation, social network analysis, data mining, Machine Learning, or artificial intelligence, in particular the specific area of swarm intelligence. Between articles, books, and conferences, he credits more than 300 publications. He has published in scientific journals such as The Journal of Supercomputing, Information Fusion, or The Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing. He is part of the Spanish management committee of the European COST Action INDCOR (Interactive Narratives for Complexity Representations).

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