Exploring Alternative Health Facebook Groups in the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Automated Content Analysis Through Structural Topic Modeling.

Alternative health (AH) has an important role in public health across cultures, as the World Health Organization acknowledges. Using structural topic modeling, we analyzed 25,561 posts from public Facebook groups that contained AH-related content during the COVID-19 pandemic over 3 years. Thirty-one topics emerged, and they were categorized into six major themes, including (1) sharing information regarding AH treatment for COVID-19, (2) spiritual and mental healing in the pandemic, (3) news and information about COVID-19, (4) commercial content related to AH treatment, (5) COVID-19 precautions suggestions, and (6) caution against treating AH as a cure-all.

Fostering mask-wearing with virality metrics and social media literacy: evidence from the U.S. and Korea.

Although social media can pose threats to the public health by spreading misinformation and causing confusion, they can also provide wider access to health information and opportunities for health surveillance. The current study investigates the ways in which preventive health behaviors and norms can be promoted on social media by analyzing data from surveys and experiments conducted in the U.S.

Partisan Bias in COVID-19 Conspiracy Theories: News Reliance and the Moderating Role of Trust in Health Authorities.

Neglecting the role of political bias in the public's perceptions of health authorities could be deceptive when studying potentially politicized COVID-19 conspiracy theories (CCTs); however, previous studies often treated health authorities as a single entity and did not distinguish between different types of CCTs. Drawing from motivated reasoning theory, we investigate the politically motivated nature of CCTs by examining their associations with individuals' media reliance, party identification, conspiratorial mentality, and importantly, trust in (politicized or independent) health authorities. In a national survey conducted in late 2020 ( = 2,239) in Turkey, a heavily polarized context, we found that not accounting for political identities shown in CCTs and health authorities could be misleading.

COVID-19 News Exposure and Vaccinations: A Moderated Mediation of Digital News Literacy Behavior and Vaccine Misperceptions.

Being exposed to and believing in misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines is a challenge for vaccine acceptance. Yet, how countervailing factors such as news literacy could complicate "the information exposure-belief in vaccine misinformation-vaccination" path needs to be unpacked to understand the communication of scientific information about COVID-19. This study examines (1) the mediating role of belief in vaccine misinformation between COVID-19 information exposure and vaccination behavior and (2) the moderating role of news literacy behaviors.

Religious affiliation and philosophical and moral beliefs about vaccines: A longitudinal study.

How do religious affiliation and beliefs shape vaccine attitudes and behaviors? This study examined the associations of attitudes and behaviors relevant to the flu, measles-mumps-rubella (MMR), and human-papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines with religious affiliations, as well as philosophical, spiritual, and moral beliefs. Respondents were 3005 adults from a probability-based, four-wave panel survey in the United States. Longitudinal structural equation modeling examined how religious affiliations and philosophical/moral beliefs shaped attitudes toward vaccines and actual vaccination.

Explaining Health Misinformation Belief through News, Social, and Alternative Health Media Use: The Moderating Roles of Need for Cognition and Faith in Intuition.

Explaining the spread and impact of health misinformation has garnered considerable attention with the uptake of social media and group messaging applications. This study contributes to that line of work by investigating how reliance on multiple digital media may help support or suppress misinformation belief, and how individual differences in misinformation susceptibility condition this process. Alternative health outlets ( media), advocating home/homeopathic remedies over conventional medicine can be important sources of misinformation, yet are largely ignored previously.

Biased perceptions against female scientists affect intentions to get vaccinated for COVID-19.

Based on role congruity theory, we investigated how gender bias may influence public attitudes toward the vaccine in Turkey. Using a between-subjects design, we tested whether an emphasis on the female versus the male scientist as the vaccine's inventor in a news story influenced attitudes about the BioNTech vaccine and vaccination intentions. Partly confirming role congruity theory, three-way interaction results from 665 participants demonstrated that among male participants with a stronger belief in traditional gender roles (compared to males with lower belief), the presence of the female inventor, either by herself or together with the male inventor, decreased the perceived efficacy and safety of the vaccine and reduced intentions to be vaccinated by the BioNTech vaccine.

The effects of scientific messages and narratives about vaccination.

A fundamental challenge complicates news decisions about covering vaccine side effects: although serious vaccine side effects are rare, less severe ones do occur occasionally. The study was designed to test whether a side effect message could induce vaccine hesitancy and whether that could be countered by pro-vaccine messages about vaccine safety. A large (N = 2,345), nationally representative experiment was conducted by randomly exposing participants to one of six videos about the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine edited from news programs produced during the 2019 measles outbreak in the United States.

Policy Views and Negative Beliefs About Vaccines in the United States, 2019.

To determine whether holding vaccine misconceptions, in the form of negative beliefs about vaccines, correlates with opposing governmental action at all levels designed to increase vaccination (e.g., removing personal belief and religious vaccine exemptions).