ATLANTA — A new report has been published by Science Direct in their journal Vaccine Volume 41, Issue 17. The report titled “Conspiracies, misinformation and resistance to public health measures during COVID-19 in white nationalist online communication”, features research from Georgia State University, Assistant Professor of Digital Communication; and Transcultural Conflict and Violence Faculty Member, Dr. Dror Walter, University at Buffalo, State University of New York, Assistant Professor of Communication Dr. Yotam Ophir and GSU Doctoral Candidate and TCV Presidential Fellow, Hui Ye. The report analyses the discourse around Covid-19.
Abstract
Recent studies documented alarming growth in antiscientific discourse among extremist groups online and especially the relatively high anti-vaccine attitudes among White Nationalists (WN). In light of accelerated politization of COVID-19 containment measures and the expansion of containment to lockdowns, masking, and more, we examine current sentiment, themes and argumentation in white nationalist discourse, regarding the COVID-19 vaccines and other containment measures. We use unsupervised machine learning approaches to analyze all conversations posted in the “Coronavirus (Covid-19)” sub-forum on Stormfront between January 2020 and December 2021 (N = 9642 posts). Additionally, we manually analyze sentiment and argumentation in 300 randomly sampled posts. We identified four discursive themes: Science, Conspiracies, Sociopolitical, and Containment. Negative- sentiment was substantially higher than what was found in prior work done before COVID-19 regarding vaccines and other containment measures. The negativity was driven mostly by arguments adapted from the anti-vaccine movement and not by WN ideology.