Authors

Svetlana Bodrunova¹; Alexandra Litvinova¹; Ivan Blekanov¹; Nikita Tarasov¹;  ¹ St.Petersburg State University, Russian Federation

Discussion

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought along an unprecedented amount of social fear and uncertainty. It, too, has spurred distrust to rational anti-COVID measures and outbursts of conspiracy theories. Within the infodemic in countries like Russia, with low trust to institutions, this has combined with the large-scale pre-existing vaccine hesitancy and resulted into appearance of widespread resistance to vaccination. While this problem was largely ignored by the media that must have problematized it, the anti-vaxxer discourse flourished in Telegram communities created by COVID denialists.

 

Both anti-vaxxer communities and COVID-19 conspiracy thinking have already been studied extensively for English-speaking societies; however, such research does not map the configuration of distrust and do not link public aggression or conspiracy theories to particular ‘addressees of distrust’, like the vaccine/virus, medicine, national authorities, business, international actors, media, and co-citizens. In our study, we do it for Russia for which a ‘triangle of distrust’ between politicians, media, and audiences has been recognized as a factor fostering vaccine hesitancy. By automated and manual assessment of a dataset of 282,000+ comments from the ‘anti_covid21’ anti-vaxxer community on Telegram, we also show that the patterns of COVID-related distrust growth are cumulative, on both micro-level (within comments to one post) and macro-level (within larger time spans).