Social media fuelling divisiveness when it comes to vaccines, says prof

Anti-vaccine and anti-vaccine mandate protests are happening all across the country, and according to a Wilfrid Laurier psychology professor, the issue is more political than ever before.

Anne Wilson said people are aligning their views on vaccines with other beliefs they hold and technology is furthering the ideological divide.

"The protests related to vaccine appear to be more politicized than the vaccine hesitant reactions have been in the past," she said. "This is something that social media seems to be particularly optimized to pump up and to make even more divisive."

She said it is also important to note the difference between the anti-vaccine and anti-mandate protesters.

The anti-vaccine movement is more political than it has been in the past, but there's also more information available to people.

"It's quite easy to have information, say anecdotes, that sound pretty scary about things going wrong," she said. "Perhaps misrepresentations of some of the data that can really make people quite worried about the vaccine."

People tend to be attracted to other people who have similar views to their own.— Prof. Anne Wilson 

Anti-mandate protesters are reacting in a more common way, that often comes out when new rules or regulations are put in place and people feel their autonomy or agency is being threatened.

"There'll be a set of people who often, you know, when that happens, they react even more negatively to that thing because they don't want to feel as though their personal control is being challenged by someone else."

'More and more extreme'

Wilson said there are two reasons social media is particularly adept at creating division. The first is called confirmation bias.

"People tend to be attracted to other people who have similar views to their own and [are] also attracted to information that's similar to what they already believe," she said. "We can curate our social circles to be mostly other people who do share our views."

The other has to do with the technology social media uses.

"There are algorithms that are operating behind the scenes essentially, that are optimizing for our attention," she said.

"These algorithms will often end up searching or seeing that we're interested in a certain kind of information and recognizing that the way to keep us paying attention longer and longer is to provide more and more of that sort of information, but more and more extreme versions of that information over time."

So someone who has basic concerns about the vaccine could quickly be exposed to anti-vaccine material.

"It can end up meaning that the information that is in front of one person's social media feed, you know, in front of our eyeballs is very, very different than the information inside of somebody else's," Wilson said.

"So it's not surprising in many cases that we come to very different conclusions about the evidence."

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