Russian Twitter Accounts and the Partisan Polarization of Vaccine Discourse, 2015-2017

To understand how Twitter accounts operated by the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) discussed vaccines to increase the credibility of their manufactured personas. We analyzed 2.82 million tweets published by 2689 IRA accounts between 2015 and 2017. Combining unsupervised machine learning and n...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inAmerican journal of public health (1971) Vol. 110; no. 5; pp. 718 - 724
Main Authors Walter, Dror, Ophir, Yotam, Jamieson, Kathleen Hall
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States American Public Health Association 01.05.2020
Subjects
AJPH Open-Themed Research
Credibility
Data mining
Datasets
Elections
Firearm laws & regulations
Global Health
Health disparities
Immunization
Immunization/Vaccines
Internet
Learning algorithms
Machine learning
Media
Methods
Network analysis
Norms
Partisanship
Polarization
Public health
Social networks
Social Science
Vaccines
United States > US
Russia
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Summary:To understand how Twitter accounts operated by the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) discussed vaccines to increase the credibility of their manufactured personas. We analyzed 2.82 million tweets published by 2689 IRA accounts between 2015 and 2017. Combining unsupervised machine learning and network analysis to identify "thematic personas" (i.e., accounts that consistently share the same topics), we analyzed the ways in which each discussed vaccines. We found differences in volume and valence of vaccine-related tweets among 9 thematic personas. Pro-Trump personas were more likely to express antivaccine sentiment. Anti-Trump personas expressed support for vaccination. Others offered a balanced valence, talked about vaccines neutrally, or did not tweet about vaccines. IRA-operated accounts discussed vaccines in manners consistent with fabricated US identities. IRA accounts discussed vaccines online in ways that evoked political identities. This could exacerbate recently emerging partisan gaps relating to vaccine misinformation, as differently valenced messages were targeted at different segments of the US public. These sophisticated targeting efforts, if repeated and increased in reach, could reduce vaccination rates and magnify health disparities.
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Peer Reviewed
All authors were responsible for the design, analysis, and write-up of the study, as well as subsequent revisions. The method for identification of thematic communities was developed by D. Walter and Y. Ophir. The code for the analysis was written by D. Walter.
CONTRIBUTORS
ISSN:0090-0036
1541-0048
DOI:10.2105/AJPH.2019.305564