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

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Social Computing and Social Media: Design, User Experience and Impact (HCII 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13315))

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Abstract

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.

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Acknowledgements

This research has been supported in full by Russian Science Foundation, project 21-18-00454 (2021–2023).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. St. Petersburg State University, 7-9 Universitetskaya nab., St. Petersburg, 199034, Russia

    Svetlana S. Bodrunova & Dmitry Nepiyuschikh

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  1. Svetlana S. Bodrunova
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  2. Dmitry Nepiyuschikh
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Correspondence to Svetlana S. Bodrunova .

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  1. Towson University, Towson, MD, USA

    Gabriele Meiselwitz

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Bodrunova, S.S., Nepiyuschikh, D. (2022). Dynamics of Distrust, Aggression, and Conspiracy Thinking in the Anti-vaccination Discourse on Russian Telegram. In: Meiselwitz, G. (eds) Social Computing and Social Media: Design, User Experience and Impact. HCII 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13315. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05061-9_33

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05061-9_33

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