The Inoculation -- Vaccine Misinformation and Society

Portugal: Is Europe’s Vaccine Hero Losing Its “Special Balance”, Allowing Right-Wing Parties to Flourish?

After elections in January, Portuguese Socialists have secured an absolute majority, promising political continuity in the country that enjoys Europe's highest rate of vaccination against COVID-19. But the side story of the election was that Portugal's previous immunity to far-right representation in parliament has waned: the Chega party increased its presence from just one to 12 seats.

Chega's main pitch was opposition to the so-called elite, known as "the big center" in Portugal. And, as our analysis shows, this extends to opposing vaccine mandates and restrictions. To find out more, Daiva talked to Portuguese researchers Silvia Roque and Daniel Garcia.

You can find a Nature article about Portugal’s “special balance” here. Daniel Garcia’s thesis (in English) is available here. And this is a video of the prime minister being confronted by anti-vaccination protesters. And this is the link to the State of Hate 2021 report. Transcripts are at www.theinoculation.com

​​After the investigation is complete, you will be able to find the code we used for the analysis of the Portuguese data on our GitHub repository. The production of this investigation is supported by a grant from the IJ4EU fund. The International Press Institute (IPI), the European Journalism Centre (EJC) and any other partners in the IJ4EU fund are not responsible for the content published and any use made out of it.

The French Elections are Coming up. Right-Wing Politicians Are Dominating the Vaccine Debate on Twitter.

We used a custom Twitter scraper to collect and analyse the tweets of 12 candidate's slated to run in the first round of the French presidential election on April 10.  We discuss our findings and talk to Estelle Brun, an associate research fellow at IRIS - Institut de Relations Internationales et Stratégiques in Paris.

This is a summary of what candidates think about vaccination. You can read specifically about vaccine passports here and about racism and exclusion in electoral debates here. You can also listen to our episode where we discuss how vaccine mandates may backfire - featuring former European Commissioner Vytenis Andriukaitis.

After the investigation is complete, you will be able to find the code we used for the analysis of the French data on our GitHub repository. The Twitter list of French presidential candidates can be found here. The production of this investigation is supported by a grant from the IJ4EU fund. The International Press Institute (IPI), the European Journalism Centre (EJC) and any other partners in the IJ4EU fund are not responsible for the content published and any use made out of it.

The Falsehood Firehose: How Russian Disinformation Actors Spread Propaganda

As Russia invades Ukraine, we revisited our conversation with Miriam Matthews, author of a report published last April called Superspreaders of Malign and Subversive Information. It describes how Russia actors use malign and subversive information efforts to target U.S. audiences from January 2020 to July 2020. While we couldn't foresee current developments, the interview is still a valuable look at how Russia spreads disinformation.

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Will Super-Powerful Artificial Intelligence Turbocharge Disinformation? Episode 22

Georgetown University researchers programmed a text generator to come up with disinformation on climate change and politics. Once tweeted, the computer-generated disinformation persuaded test subjects, and could even nudge the readers to change their minds on important subjects such as climate change and politics. 

This episode explores the power and the limits of AI-generated disinformation. We talk to Micah Musser, an analyst at Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology.

This episode was produced with the support of the Transatlantic Media Fellowship by the Heinrich Boell Foundation Washington, DC. Please subscribe to our newsletter, and this show on Apple Podcasts, Audible, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or another platform of your choice. Follow us on Facebook as @theinoculation, on Twitter as @TInoculation, and on Instagram as @the_inoculation

Spotify, Disinformation and Joe Rogan – Disinformation on Social Audio, Podcasts

After Spotify chose to remove Neil Young's music rather than challenge its relationship with podcaster Joe Rogan (you can read more about the controversy here), the problem of disinformation in audio is rearing its head? Eva talked to WF Thomas, a disinformation researcher, and Valerie Wirtschafter,  senior data analyst in the Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technologies Initiative at the Brookings Institution, to find out.

This episode was produced with support of the Transatlantic Media Fellowship by the Heinrich Boell Foundation Washington, DC. Please subscribe to our newsletter, and this show on Apple Podcasts, Audible, Google Podcasts, Spotify or another platform of your choice. Follow us on Facebook as @theinoculation, on Twitter as @TInoculation, and on Instagram as @the_inoculation

 

How Anti-Vaccination Movements Pull Parents In

When Daiva and Eva were starting their investigation into activism against measles vaccination, another team of journalists also set off to explore this movement in other parts of Europe. Anna Nordbeck and Malin Olofsson started investigating the Scandinavian anti-vaccination movement in 2019, and this led the team all the way to the US, where influential leaders of the movement create movies, tour the country, and teach similar movements abroad about pulling parents in and drawing them into the world of conspiracies. The Inoculation’s team called Malin Olofsson to hear more about the Swedish team’s findings.

The Vaccinkrigarna documentary is available from SVT in Swedish. 

Our reporting is supported by IJ4EU. Please subscribe to our newsletter, and this show on Apple Podcasts, Audible, Google Podcasts, Spotify or another platform of your choice. Follow us on Facebook as @theinoculation, on Twitter as @TInoculation, and on Instagram as @the_inoculation

Happy holidays – new season – coming up in January: how people get pulled into anti-vaccination movements

As the year comes to an end, we look back at our reporting in 2021 and talk about the next season, which will begin in January.

Our reporting is supported by IJ4EU. Please subscribe to our newsletter, and this show on Apple Podcasts, Audible, Google Podcasts, Spotify or another platform of your choice. Follow us on Facebook as @theinoculation, on Twitter as @TInoculation, and on Instagram as @the_inoculation

Romania‘s Covid Jab Lag: a Country Trapped in Mistrust, Faulty Infrastructure and Trauma (Episode 19)

As omicron cases surge, the majority of Romanians are still not fully vaccinated against COVID-19. Romania has the 2nd lowest vaccination rate in the EU. It is also the country where residents are the most likely in the EU to learn about science and technology from television as opposed to other sources. Together with Italians, they are the most likely in the EU to believe that early humans roamed the Earth along with dinosaurs. Where does this pervasive distrust in the scientific consensus come from? Does television have a polarizing effect – and how can it play a more positive role? To understand the situation better, Daiva and Eva talk to Crina Boros, a Romanian journalist, who interviewed two prominent experts – Mircea Toma and Barbu Mateescu.

You can find Romania’s COVID-19 statistics here. 

Our reporting is supported by IJ4EU. Please subscribe to our newsletter, and this show on Apple Podcasts, Audible, Google Podcasts, Spotify or another platform of your choice. Follow us on Facebook as @theinoculation, on Twitter as @TInoculation, and on Instagram as @the_inoculation

Fight Against Vaccine, Climate Disinformation Linked: Expert

Opportunistic politicians and businesspeople latched onto the pandemic in their quest for fame. In Latvia, where COVID-19 death counts went through the roof in October, this had dire consequences. In this episode, Daiva and Eva speak to Nika Aleksejeva, who is a data journalism trainer and lead researcher for the Baltics at the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab. She says, “COVID-19 disinformation is a very good lesson for us to be less naive about our capabilities.”

 

You can read more about Latvia’s emergency situation here, and about the disinformation dozen here. This is the story of Latvian lab disinformation. You can also read our Re:Baltica article about the superspreaders of vaccine disinformation in the Baltics here. You can read about the Baltic elves here, here, and here.

 

Our reporting is supported by IJ4EU. Please subscribe to our newsletter, and this show on Apple Podcasts, Audible, Google Podcasts, Spotify or another platform of your choice. Follow us on Facebook as @theinoculation, on Twitter as @TInoculation, and on Instagram as @the_inoculation

How A WhatsApp-based Immigrant News Service Tackles Spanish-language Misinformation in Peru

Misinformation in languages other than English that span the globe is less policed, compared to English. Research shows that misinformation and disinformation in large languages like French and Spanish can harm people’s trust in vaccines around the world. That is especially true for communities that distrust mainstream media and are alienated from public services. To find out what can be done, Eva talked to Héctor Villa León, who offers a social-media-based news service for Venezuelan migrants in Peru - and beyond. In this episode, Daiva and Eva discuss what they learned from this.

You can read more about the Venezuelan community in Peru here and here, about the disinformation threat to diaspora communities here, about misinformation specifically in Spanish here, about the important role WhatsApp plays here and what WhatsApp is doing here.

Our reporting is supported by IJ4EU and Alfred Toepfer Stiftung. Please subscribe to our newsletter, and this show on Apple Podcasts, Audible, Google Podcasts, Spotify or another platform of your choice. Follow us on Facebook as @theinoculation, on Twitter as @TInoculation, and on Instagram as @the_inoculation