Spreading the Antidote – The Framing of COVID- 19 Vaccination Campaigns in the Brazilian Social Media Sphere

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Stefan Stieglitz
• Subject Area: Communication Sciences ; Data Management, Data-Intensive Systems, Computer Science Methods in Business Informatics
• Term: from 2021 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 468208878

• Final Report Year: 2023

Final Report Abstract

The global COVID-19 pandemic gave rise to a parallel spreading of misinformation in online communication, also coined as the ‘COVID-19 Infodemic’. In this light, especially social media have become preferential outlets for amplifying information of untrusted sources, misinformation, rumors, or conspiracy theories. This complicates social mobilization and awareness campaigns by health organizations, e.g., for sensitizing the public for COVID-19 vaccination. This interdisciplinary project aimed to better understand how collective action frames succeed (or fail) in social media pandemic response. This joint project between Brazil and Germany combined qualitative frame analyses with social media analytics (SMA) techniques to investigate collective action frames on social media about the COVID-19 vaccination in Brazil. The analysis derived theoretical advancements in framing theory and the misinformation literature. Moreover, the project derived strategies for health organizations to succeed at social mobilization via social media and at overcoming ‘infodemic’ counter-movements. At the same time, frame analysis methods were improved by deploying data collection and processing techniques from the field of SMA.

Publications

• A Framing Analysis of the COVID- 19 Vaccination Campaigns by the Brazilian Health Organizations in Twitter [Conference presentation]. Multidisciplinary International Symposium on Disinformation in Open Online Media 2022, Boise, United States.
  Marx, J., Blanco, B., Stieglitz, S. & Amaral, A.
  
• Narratives of Anti-Vaccination Movements in the German and Brazilian Twittersphere: A Grounded Theory Approach. Media and Communication, 10(2), 144-156.
  Amaral, Adriana Da Rosa; Jung, Anna-Katharina; Braun, Lea-Marie & Blanco, Beatriz
  
• Understanding the Narratives of Anti-Vaccination Movements in the German and Brazilian YouTube Channels: A Grounded Theory Approach [Conference presentation]. 72nd Annual ICA Conference, 2022, Paris, France.
  Blanco, B., Amaral, A. D. R., Jung, A. K. & Braun, L. M.