Researchers used artificial intelligence to analyze over eighty million tweets between 2007 and 2016.
They found that people generally agreed on climate change but not vaccines.
There was overwhelming support for the view that climate change is because of human activity and requires action. Also, users with opposing views on climate change regularly interacted with each other.
But it was a different story for vaccines. About 15 to 20 per cent of users were pro-vaccine and around 70 per cent expressed no strong sentiment. Online communities with differences in opinion barely interacted with each other.
The study wanted to find how our online lives and information sharing influences our decisions in real life.
When it comes to vaccines, could these differences in opinion and online echo chambers have led to the highly polarized debates around vaccines during COVID19? It could be that if we repeated the same study with data from the past two years, we would see an even more fragmented society when it comes to vaccines.
Original article:
Researchers use AI to analyze tweets debating vaccination and climate change
Original study:
Debates about vaccines and climate change on social media networks: a study in contrasts