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Responding to anti-vaxxer posts on Facebook using the WHO best practice guidance

Wüller, C.A.E. (2020) Responding to anti-vaxxer posts on Facebook using the WHO best practice guidance.

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Abstract:The anti-vaccine movement becomes more popular recently. They fight against vaccination. They support their statements with misinformation drawn from fraud research papers and spread them via (social) media channels. The WHO declared the anti-vaccine movement as one of the greatest public health threats of the current time. To counter this movement, the WHO developed a best practice guideline on ‘how to respond to vocal vaccine deniers in public’, which focuses on media interviews. However, the anti-vaccine movement is also represented on other media platforms like social media channels. In this study the WHO guidance was applied to Facebook, in order to investigate, whether the stepwise response advice is also applicable to social media context. An anti-vaxxer post was taken as basis and a response to that post was constructed applying the WHO guidance, as well as a health-related-comment. The participants were assigned to one of three groups, either the only-post condition, the post-and-WHO-based-comment condition or the post-and-health-related-comment condition, to check whether the WHO-based-comment had an impact on the participants risk perception, benefit perception, trust and intention towards vaccines. The study showed no impact of the post-and-comment combinations on the risk perception, benefit perception, trust and intention of the participants in any of the groups.
Item Type:Essay (Bachelor)
Faculty:BMS: Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences
Subject:77 psychology
Programme:Psychology BSc (56604)
Link to this item:https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/80575
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