Anti-vaccine sentiment strong among white nationalists - with some predictable exceptions
Research has indicated a growing resistance to vaccines among U.S. conservatives and Republicans. Following past successes of the far-right in mainstreaming health misinformation, this study tracks almost two decades of vaccine discourse on the extremist, white nationalist (WN) online message-board Stormfront. This mixed-methods approach combines unsupervised machine learning of 8892 posts including the term “vaccin*“, published on Stormfront between 2001 and 2017. Four themes were identified: conspiracies, science, race and white innovation. The prominence of themes over time was relatively stable.
As with past health-related conspiracy theories, high levels of anti-vaccine sentiment in online far-right sociotechnical information systems could threaten public health, especially if it ‘spills-over’ to mainstream media. Many pro-vaccine arguments on the forum relied on racist, WN reasoning, thus preventing the authors from recommending the use of these unethical arguments in future public health communications.
Think of narratives that alienate, essentialize, and undermine people based on identity-based differences as identity propaganda
This article develops the concept of “identity propaganda,” or narratives that strategically target and exploit identity-based differences in accord with pre-existing power structures to maintain hegemonic social orders. In proposing and developing the concept of identity propaganda, we especially aim to help researchers find new insights into their data on misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda by outlining a framework for unpacking layers of historical power relations embedded in the content they analyze. We focus on three forms of identity propaganda: othering narratives that alienate and marginalize non-white or non-dominant groups; essentializing narratives that create generalizing tropes of marginalized groups; and authenticating narratives that call upon people to prove or undermine their claims to be part of certain groups. We demonstrate the utility of this framework through our analysis of identity propaganda around Vice President Kamala Harris during the 2020 US presidential election.
So much remains unknown about mis/disinformation
This short section of a larger co-written report addresses three central questions:
- Where and with whom does viral mis/disinformation originate?
- Which mis/disinformation correction strategies work best with which audiences or demographics?
- Which platform algorithms play the biggest role in spreading—or curbing—mis/disinformation?
In many cases, the authors point to gaps in knowledge and future directions for scholarship needed in order to answer or at least adequately explore these questions.