Influence of Social Media, Social Networks, and Misinformation on Vaccine Acceptance Among Black and Latinx Individuals

Abstract One of the most recent and significant public health problems deals with addressing vaccine hesitancy and mis/disinformation. As new types of vaccines become effective and available, and bundled together, it becomes increasingly important that researchers and health departments learn how to best communicate to the public the correct science behind vaccines. Black/African American and Latinx populations might be especially impacted by misinformation due to health inequity and low health literacy. However, despite extensive exposure to vaccine mis- and disinformation, many Blacks and Latinx are resilient to misinformation and still choose to get vaccinated. This application takes a unique approach in leveraging that positive outcome by identifying the predictors of Black and Latinx individuals who are frequently exposed to misinformation, yet demonstrate broad vaccine acceptance for different vaccine types. Many factors play a role in vaccine acceptance/hesitancy, including social media and social networks, as well as traditional multi-level factors such as mental health, political ideology, stigma, access to health services, trust in the healthcare system, and educational opportunities. Our team has conducted extensive research on the factors influencing attitudes and behaviors among Black and Latinx populations, for COVID-19 vaccine uptake, as well as ways to use digital data and tools to gain insights and intervene to improve them. In this study, we seek to use similar artificial intelligence methods on social media, social network, and other multi-level data to identify factors influencing vaccine acceptance among Black and Latinx populations. We seek to enroll 500 Black and Latinx individuals who are Twitter (X) followers of known vaccine-hesitant influencers. We will collect baseline, 3-, 6-, and 12-month follow-up data on participants’ vaccine acceptance; misinformation exposure; perceptions about vaccines, including willingness to receive future vaccines or enroll in a vaccine clinical trial; digital contextual data (e.g., social media content; social network ties; and other multi- level factors associated with vaccine knowledge and acceptance (e.g., political ideology, medical distrust, structural factors). We will study the factors affecting acceptance of vaccines. We will also develop a tool to visualize the data to inform researchers about how to add these new data/approaches to surveillance efforts. Specifically, we seek to 1) Identify the relationship between social media data and vaccine acceptance among Black and Latinx followers of influencers spreading vaccine-hesitant information, 2) Examine the influence of social network factors on vaccine acceptance, and 3) Develop a visualization tool to graph and map contextual data (e.g., social media content and geographic and network location of social network ties).