Retracted Articles about COVID-19 Vaccines Enable Vaccine Misinformation on Twitter

Rod Abhari, Esteban Villa-Turek, Nicholas Vincent, Henry K. Dambanemuya, Emoke-Ágnes Horvát

Abstract: 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.