Retracted scientific articles about COVID-19 vaccines have proliferated false claims about vaccination harms and discouraged vaccine acceptance. Our study analyzed the topical content of 4,876 English-language tweets about retracted COVID-19 vaccine research and found that 27.4% of tweets contained retraction-related misinformation. Misinformed tweets either ignored the retraction, or less commonly, politicized the retraction using conspiratorial rhetoric. To address this, Twitter and other social media platforms should expand their efforts to address retraction-related misinformation.
@article{arxiv.2303.16302,
title = {Retracted Articles about COVID-19 Vaccines Enable Vaccine Misinformation on Twitter},
author = {Rod Abhari and Esteban Villa-Turek and Nicholas Vincent and Henry Dambanemuya and Emőke-Ágnes Horvát},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.16302},
year = {2023}
}