Rumour mining
The aim of the project is to investigate the role and importance of rumouring for the vaccination skepticism growing on the internet, and how it can be understood as an expression of civic engagement in the present digital times entailing crucial transformations for everyday civic culture. The project combines theories and methods from ethnology, media and communication studies, and language technology. Theoretically, the project builds upon, and develop, media researcher Dahlgren’s work on civic culture and Kitta’s studies of the anti-vaccination movement. The overarching research question is: How have the everyday practice and experience of, and the conditions for, rumours been shaped and reshaped in the digital age, and what do these processes mean for civic engagement and participation? The growing vaccination hesitancy in Sweden, characterized by extensive rumouring on the internet, constitutes the empirical focus. The project also has a method developing purpose, in examining how quantitative (language technology) and qualitative (ethnographic) methods can be combined to an effective tool for exploring how rumours are established, emitted and circulated on social media, and how people relate to these rumours in their own deliberations and decision-making. The method combination, termed “rumour mining”, will be tested in a minor pilot study of another case, very different from the main one, that is, the Swedish Academy s transformation in the wake of #metoo.
Final report
The project’s purpose and development
The aim of the project has been to study the role and significance of rumor-mongering for the increasing online vaccine criticism. The research has been conducted in the form of a so-called mixed-methods collaboration with method development as a central aim. We have investigated how quantitative (language technological) and qualitative (digital ethnographical) methods can be combined into an effective tool by which we can study how rumors are established, spread and circulate in social media and how people relate to such rumors when deciding about vaccination. Our main research question has been: how has everyday practice, experience and conditions wrt rumors been shaped and reshaped in the digital era and how do these processes impact civic engagement?
In consultation with RJ we shifted the focus of our investigation, from vaccine rumors about measles to those about COVID-19, since the public vaccine discourse became dominated by debates about the latter. (However, hesitancy wrt more than one vaccine is common among vaccine skepticists.) Initiating and conducting a research project about vaccine attitudes during the pandemic years 2020–2022 when Sweden and the world experienced acute threats to people’s life and health, societal lockdowns, mass vaccinations and major protests against these, prompts three overarching reflections. Firstly, established media showed great interest in our research and we received numerous conference invitations. Secondly, the originally planned fieldwork became impossible. Instead, we investigated online discussions (Hammarlin, Kokkinakis and Borin 2023). Thirdly, we found ourselves studying everyday communication about new vaccines rather than, as planned, attitudes about established vaccines for minors.
A brief description of the implementation
The project has served as a bridge across discipline boundaries. The two project teams have worked in two different locations, the media scholars at Lund University and the language technologists at the University of Gothenburg. In addition, physical meetings became impossible during the pandemic, so that the project was coordinated through digital meetings. Our overall ambition has been to combine quantitative and qualitative methods in our publications, but we have also published within a single paradigm whenever a research question motivated this. Communication between the involved disciplines was something of a challenge, in particular during the initial phases of the project. The difficulties abated with time, helped along by the balanced research group composition with two social scientists and two language technologists. The collaboration has been extremely instructive to the project participants: we have been able to develop new methods and communication strategies to successfully conduct interdisciplinary research.
Internationalization has been a guiding principle, for example: In 2022 our international advisory board (IAB) visited Lund for a two-day workshop open also to other staff. The IAB then acted as sounding board and manuscript reviewers during the preparation of our Nordic edited volume (Routledge 2024). Hammarlin (PI) was visiting researcher for a total of seven weeks at the University of Amsterdam and Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin en Yveline, which has led to new research collaborations. Our project results have been published mainly in international peer-reviewed journals and peer-reviewed conference proceedings. We have also published blog posts and popular-scientific texts aimed at a larger international audience.
In publications, we have specifically analyzed rumors as a specific form of communication, but they have also been studied as a secondary form of communication embedded in other types of communication practices, which is common in everyday speech.
The project’s three most important results and conclusions
We have mixed topic-modelling analysis (distant reading) with thematic analysis (close reading) in order to understand vaccine rumors better. Disseminination of (rumors about) biomedical research findings in social media was studied in order to investigate how vaccine skeptics actively use state-of-the-art research results to promote their views. We thus disprove the myth that vaccine-hesitant individuals by definition shun science, leading to the conclusion that the strategy on the part of authorities by which more scientific facts are mustered in order to counteract vaccine hesitancy will not be effective by itself. Those who are vaccine-hesitant find their own medical experts and interpret them in dialogue with like-minded people. By pointing out this problem as well as offering models for analyzing it, we believe that our research favors the development of novel communication strategies that help in understanding and counteracting vaccine resistance and vaccine rumors.
The curiosity-prompted and empathic perspective on vaccine rumors and on the people who spread them which we have gradually come to embrace during the project, is an important result in its own right. This perspective implies the insight that there may be complex reasons – such as experienced serious illness and life-altering loss – that people abstain from vaccination for themselves or their children. In our research we have thus refrained from denigrating vaccine hesitant individuals – who frequently accept some vaccines but refuse others – and have strived to invite dialogue in politically polarized times. A positive review in The Lancet states among other things that “Vaccine hesitancy in the Nordic countries is a valuable resource for those studying pandemic policy or seeking to understand vaccine hesitancy and is an asset in bridging the opposing sides of the polemic vaccine debate”. We contribute neither to normalizing vaccine criticism nor to dismissing vaccine critics as tinfoil hats. Instead, our research results indicate the great complexity of this problem. And complex problems require complex solutions.
The fear of adverse side effects is the single most frequent reason that people hesitate when faced with the decision to vaccinate themselves or their children. The societal changes brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic have led us to conceptually extend the concept side effects to also comprise what we tentatively refer to as societal or civic side effects. Similarly to medical side effects these are reactions to mass vaccination, but social and cultural reactions. We believe that it is fruitful to analyze counter campaigns on the internet as a kind of social side effects in the wake of the pandemic, which should be seen in the light of the present-day enormous possibilites to disseminate opinions digitally and the general difficulty of distinguishing between opinion and scientific fact.
An important result in the field of language technology is how the combination of topic modelling and thematic analysis may stimulate the development of more sophisticated tools for the analysis of vaccine discourses. Combined distant and close reading can be used to refine the topic modelling in order to understand how themes overlap e.g. in vaccine rumors as well as how discourse strategies change according to target audience and platform. Combined with sentiment analysis this may increase our ability to distinguish criticism of specific vaccines from a general anti-science stance. Language technology can also benefit from close reading findings in order to better analyze pro- and anti-discourses, where more than one – frequently opposing – perspective occur simultaneously. This is particularly relevant in social media.
New research questions
We need a better understanding of young citizens’ attitude to vaccines, leading us to focus on this group in particular in our future research. Citizens aged 18–30 have experienced two pandemics during their short lifetimes, accompanied by mass vaccinations: the swine flu (2009–2011) and COVID-19 (2020–2023). Seen as a pivotal age group, what can we learn from the values and norms of young adults in a future when most likely pandemics will be more frequent? Using language technological tools, we aim to analyze the posts of microinfluencers and the sentiment expressed there in order to understand how they influence is group. The popular culture (e.g. movies, television series and social media) that they consume is one relevant factor, wrt how it shapes how young people react to health crises. Language technology methods can be employed to identify anxiety and pessimistic topics in such media and connect them to attitudes. They can also be used to analyze the effectiveness of rhetorical strategies used in public health communication directed to young people by focusing on how this group engages with different messages.
Another emerging research question revolves around apocalyptic notions among vaccine skeptics in relation to mass vaccinations and is being investigated in an ongoing RJ research program (project no. M22-0018).
Dissemination of results
We have presented our research at high-profile international conferences, such as International Communication Association (ICA, Dijon 2022 and Brisbane 2023), European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST, Madrid 2022), European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA, online 2021), NordMedia (Bergen 2023), International Society of Experimental Linguistics (ExLing, Paris 2022 and Athens 2023) and Medical Informatics Europe Conference (MIE, Gothenburg, 2023).
Public outreach activities
The main outreach activities have been interviews, participation in public debates and popular-scientific publications. Interviews have appeared in, among others, the dailies Svenska Dagbladet, Dagens Nyheter, Sydsvenska Dagbladet, in Swedish public service television and radio, TV4 and in various podcasts. An op-ed piece in Svenska Dagbladet and a so-called insight article on the platform The Conversation, both by Hammarlin (PI), have received widespread attention.
The aim of the project has been to study the role and significance of rumor-mongering for the increasing online vaccine criticism. The research has been conducted in the form of a so-called mixed-methods collaboration with method development as a central aim. We have investigated how quantitative (language technological) and qualitative (digital ethnographical) methods can be combined into an effective tool by which we can study how rumors are established, spread and circulate in social media and how people relate to such rumors when deciding about vaccination. Our main research question has been: how has everyday practice, experience and conditions wrt rumors been shaped and reshaped in the digital era and how do these processes impact civic engagement?
In consultation with RJ we shifted the focus of our investigation, from vaccine rumors about measles to those about COVID-19, since the public vaccine discourse became dominated by debates about the latter. (However, hesitancy wrt more than one vaccine is common among vaccine skepticists.) Initiating and conducting a research project about vaccine attitudes during the pandemic years 2020–2022 when Sweden and the world experienced acute threats to people’s life and health, societal lockdowns, mass vaccinations and major protests against these, prompts three overarching reflections. Firstly, established media showed great interest in our research and we received numerous conference invitations. Secondly, the originally planned fieldwork became impossible. Instead, we investigated online discussions (Hammarlin, Kokkinakis and Borin 2023). Thirdly, we found ourselves studying everyday communication about new vaccines rather than, as planned, attitudes about established vaccines for minors.
A brief description of the implementation
The project has served as a bridge across discipline boundaries. The two project teams have worked in two different locations, the media scholars at Lund University and the language technologists at the University of Gothenburg. In addition, physical meetings became impossible during the pandemic, so that the project was coordinated through digital meetings. Our overall ambition has been to combine quantitative and qualitative methods in our publications, but we have also published within a single paradigm whenever a research question motivated this. Communication between the involved disciplines was something of a challenge, in particular during the initial phases of the project. The difficulties abated with time, helped along by the balanced research group composition with two social scientists and two language technologists. The collaboration has been extremely instructive to the project participants: we have been able to develop new methods and communication strategies to successfully conduct interdisciplinary research.
Internationalization has been a guiding principle, for example: In 2022 our international advisory board (IAB) visited Lund for a two-day workshop open also to other staff. The IAB then acted as sounding board and manuscript reviewers during the preparation of our Nordic edited volume (Routledge 2024). Hammarlin (PI) was visiting researcher for a total of seven weeks at the University of Amsterdam and Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin en Yveline, which has led to new research collaborations. Our project results have been published mainly in international peer-reviewed journals and peer-reviewed conference proceedings. We have also published blog posts and popular-scientific texts aimed at a larger international audience.
In publications, we have specifically analyzed rumors as a specific form of communication, but they have also been studied as a secondary form of communication embedded in other types of communication practices, which is common in everyday speech.
The project’s three most important results and conclusions
We have mixed topic-modelling analysis (distant reading) with thematic analysis (close reading) in order to understand vaccine rumors better. Disseminination of (rumors about) biomedical research findings in social media was studied in order to investigate how vaccine skeptics actively use state-of-the-art research results to promote their views. We thus disprove the myth that vaccine-hesitant individuals by definition shun science, leading to the conclusion that the strategy on the part of authorities by which more scientific facts are mustered in order to counteract vaccine hesitancy will not be effective by itself. Those who are vaccine-hesitant find their own medical experts and interpret them in dialogue with like-minded people. By pointing out this problem as well as offering models for analyzing it, we believe that our research favors the development of novel communication strategies that help in understanding and counteracting vaccine resistance and vaccine rumors.
The curiosity-prompted and empathic perspective on vaccine rumors and on the people who spread them which we have gradually come to embrace during the project, is an important result in its own right. This perspective implies the insight that there may be complex reasons – such as experienced serious illness and life-altering loss – that people abstain from vaccination for themselves or their children. In our research we have thus refrained from denigrating vaccine hesitant individuals – who frequently accept some vaccines but refuse others – and have strived to invite dialogue in politically polarized times. A positive review in The Lancet states among other things that “Vaccine hesitancy in the Nordic countries is a valuable resource for those studying pandemic policy or seeking to understand vaccine hesitancy and is an asset in bridging the opposing sides of the polemic vaccine debate”. We contribute neither to normalizing vaccine criticism nor to dismissing vaccine critics as tinfoil hats. Instead, our research results indicate the great complexity of this problem. And complex problems require complex solutions.
The fear of adverse side effects is the single most frequent reason that people hesitate when faced with the decision to vaccinate themselves or their children. The societal changes brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic have led us to conceptually extend the concept side effects to also comprise what we tentatively refer to as societal or civic side effects. Similarly to medical side effects these are reactions to mass vaccination, but social and cultural reactions. We believe that it is fruitful to analyze counter campaigns on the internet as a kind of social side effects in the wake of the pandemic, which should be seen in the light of the present-day enormous possibilites to disseminate opinions digitally and the general difficulty of distinguishing between opinion and scientific fact.
An important result in the field of language technology is how the combination of topic modelling and thematic analysis may stimulate the development of more sophisticated tools for the analysis of vaccine discourses. Combined distant and close reading can be used to refine the topic modelling in order to understand how themes overlap e.g. in vaccine rumors as well as how discourse strategies change according to target audience and platform. Combined with sentiment analysis this may increase our ability to distinguish criticism of specific vaccines from a general anti-science stance. Language technology can also benefit from close reading findings in order to better analyze pro- and anti-discourses, where more than one – frequently opposing – perspective occur simultaneously. This is particularly relevant in social media.
New research questions
We need a better understanding of young citizens’ attitude to vaccines, leading us to focus on this group in particular in our future research. Citizens aged 18–30 have experienced two pandemics during their short lifetimes, accompanied by mass vaccinations: the swine flu (2009–2011) and COVID-19 (2020–2023). Seen as a pivotal age group, what can we learn from the values and norms of young adults in a future when most likely pandemics will be more frequent? Using language technological tools, we aim to analyze the posts of microinfluencers and the sentiment expressed there in order to understand how they influence is group. The popular culture (e.g. movies, television series and social media) that they consume is one relevant factor, wrt how it shapes how young people react to health crises. Language technology methods can be employed to identify anxiety and pessimistic topics in such media and connect them to attitudes. They can also be used to analyze the effectiveness of rhetorical strategies used in public health communication directed to young people by focusing on how this group engages with different messages.
Another emerging research question revolves around apocalyptic notions among vaccine skeptics in relation to mass vaccinations and is being investigated in an ongoing RJ research program (project no. M22-0018).
Dissemination of results
We have presented our research at high-profile international conferences, such as International Communication Association (ICA, Dijon 2022 and Brisbane 2023), European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST, Madrid 2022), European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA, online 2021), NordMedia (Bergen 2023), International Society of Experimental Linguistics (ExLing, Paris 2022 and Athens 2023) and Medical Informatics Europe Conference (MIE, Gothenburg, 2023).
Public outreach activities
The main outreach activities have been interviews, participation in public debates and popular-scientific publications. Interviews have appeared in, among others, the dailies Svenska Dagbladet, Dagens Nyheter, Sydsvenska Dagbladet, in Swedish public service television and radio, TV4 and in various podcasts. An op-ed piece in Svenska Dagbladet and a so-called insight article on the platform The Conversation, both by Hammarlin (PI), have received widespread attention.