TY - GEN

T1 - Dynamics of Distrust, Aggression, and Conspiracy Thinking in the Anti-vaccination Discourse on Russian Telegram

AU - Bodrunova, Svetlana S.

AU - Nepiyuschikh, Dmitry

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

PY - 2022

Y1 - 2022

N2 - The COVID-19 pandemic has brought along an unprecedented amount of social fear and uncertainty. The infodemic has spurred the spread of distrust to elites and their rationality, as well as an outburst of conspiracy theories, around the world. Most studies that investigate the relations between trust to social institutions and public perception of the COVID-related threats employ self-reporting, which may distort the results. This is why it is crucial to also explore discussions on social media. Despite the already existing abundance of datasets collected for misinformation, anti-vaccination, and COVID-19-related conspiracy theories, several research gaps may be identified. First, anti-vaxxer communities are rarely studied beyond the English-language context. Second, directions and main attractors of popular distrust are rarely mapped. Third, the dynamics of distrust and conspiracist thinking towards various actors of the pandemic is not explored. To address these gaps, we assess the 282,000+ comments in the largest antivaxxer community on Russian Telegram, namely anti_covid21 (January to July 2021), including 12,200+ comments being coded manually. We find that ‘the discourse of distrust’ is highly politicized, where distrust to national and global actors may be a mediator to vaccine distrust. We show that conspiracies may be a mechanism of secondary coping not only for a person but also within aggressive discussions, as dynamics of their appearance depends on discussion outbursts and aggression in them. We identify a ‘spiral of distrust’ as a cumulative effect of interaction between distrust, aggression, and intensity of commenting, and show that mechanisms of trust building in the antivaxxer community are tribal, unlike the media-like ones in more rational pro-vaccination channels.

AB - The COVID-19 pandemic has brought along an unprecedented amount of social fear and uncertainty. The infodemic has spurred the spread of distrust to elites and their rationality, as well as an outburst of conspiracy theories, around the world. Most studies that investigate the relations between trust to social institutions and public perception of the COVID-related threats employ self-reporting, which may distort the results. This is why it is crucial to also explore discussions on social media. Despite the already existing abundance of datasets collected for misinformation, anti-vaccination, and COVID-19-related conspiracy theories, several research gaps may be identified. First, anti-vaxxer communities are rarely studied beyond the English-language context. Second, directions and main attractors of popular distrust are rarely mapped. Third, the dynamics of distrust and conspiracist thinking towards various actors of the pandemic is not explored. To address these gaps, we assess the 282,000+ comments in the largest antivaxxer community on Russian Telegram, namely anti_covid21 (January to July 2021), including 12,200+ comments being coded manually. We find that ‘the discourse of distrust’ is highly politicized, where distrust to national and global actors may be a mediator to vaccine distrust. We show that conspiracies may be a mechanism of secondary coping not only for a person but also within aggressive discussions, as dynamics of their appearance depends on discussion outbursts and aggression in them. We identify a ‘spiral of distrust’ as a cumulative effect of interaction between distrust, aggression, and intensity of commenting, and show that mechanisms of trust building in the antivaxxer community are tribal, unlike the media-like ones in more rational pro-vaccination channels.

KW - Aggression

KW - Anti-vaccination

KW - Conspiracy theories

KW - COVID-19

KW - Cumulative deliberation

KW - Discussion dynamics

KW - Telegram

KW - Trust

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85133011893&partnerID=8YFLogxK

UR - https://www.mendeley.com/catalogue/9f268758-9e4a-3fac-8a32-857427242986/

U2 - 10.1007/978-3-031-05061-9_33

DO - 10.1007/978-3-031-05061-9_33

M3 - Conference contribution

AN - SCOPUS:85133011893

SN - 9783031050602

T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)

SP - 468

EP - 484

BT - Social Computing and Social Media

A2 - Meiselwitz, Gabriele

PB - Springer Nature

T2 - 14th International Conference on Social Computing and Social Media, SCSM 2022 Held as Part of the 24th HCI International Conference, HCII 2022

Y2 - 26 June 2022 through 1 July 2022

ER -