The Dynamics of Online Opinion Formation: Polarization Around the Vaccine Development for COVID-19

Gaurav Jain (), Avinash Bapu Sreenivas (), Samrat Gupta () and Amit Anand Tiwari ()
Additional contact information
Gaurav Jain: Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad
Avinash Bapu Sreenivas: Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad
Samrat Gupta: Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad
Amit Anand Tiwari: Indian Institute of Management Rohtak

A chapter in Causes and Symptoms of Socio-Cultural Polarization, 2022, pp 51-72 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract According to the World Health Organization (WHO), social media-induced polarization caused due to the spread of misinformation related to the efficacy and side effects of a COVID-19 vaccine is potentially leading to vaccine hesitancy, one of the top ten threats to global health. In this study, we investigate the dynamics of social media polarization around COVID-19 vaccine which could be one of the causes of vaccine hesitancy. We use a simulation-based model of dynamical co-evolution in adaptive networks wherein interacting individuals influence each other’s opinions to arrive at a final network state. The opinion formation model simulates the temporal dynamics of social media polarization on the comments posted on different COVID-19 vaccine-development-related YouTube videos. The experimental results suggest that the degree of polarization in the online discourse, as measured by the time taken to form consensus, increases with recency in time. This finding significantly contributes to the highly contested debate around whether the flow of information on social media fosters or counteracts polarization.

Keywords: Polarization; COVID-19 pandemic; COVID-19 vaccine; Online opinion formation; Consensus formation; Social media (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-981-16-5268-4_3

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9789811652684

DOI: 10.1007/978-981-16-5268-4_3

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Springer Books from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().