People who became anti-vaccine due to the coronavirus pandemic have less interest in politics, but more interest in conspiracy theories and spirituality. Professor Fujio Toriumi of the University of Tokyo Graduate School of Engineering, Visiting Researcher Tsuyoshi Sakaki of the University of Tokyo Future Vision Research Center, Professor Tetsuro Kobayashi of the Waseda University Faculty of Political Science and Economics, and Associate Professor Mitsuo Yoshida of the University of Tsukuba Graduate School of Humanities and Social Business Sciences. , analyzed tweets related to vaccines during the coronavirus pandemic and found the following results.
According to the University of Tokyo, a research group used machine learning to collect approximately 2021 million vaccine-related tweets in 1 and divided them into three groups: "pro-vaccine," "criticism of vaccine policy," and "anti-vaccine" groups, and found that many tweets were anti-vaccine. We defined the accounts that follow these tweets as ``accounts that spread anti-vaccine tweets,'' and the accounts that follow these as ``anti-vaccine supporters.''
An analysis of the opposition revealed that those who had been opposed before the coronavirus pandemic were highly interested in politics and had strong liberal tendencies, but those who newly became opponents during the coronavirus pandemic had less interest in politics and were more likely to believe in conspiracies. It turned out that he was interested in theory and spirituality.
Opposition parties from before the coronavirus pandemic tended to follow the Constitutional Democratic Party, Communist Party, and Reiwa Shinsengumi, but those who newly became opposition parties during the coronavirus pandemic tended to follow existing political parties. I couldn't.
However, in 2022, the number of people following anti-vaccine political parties increased rapidly. The research group believes that the support of new opposition parties was behind the rapid progress of the participating parties in the 2022 House of Councilors elections.
Paper information:[Journal of Computational Social Science] Anti-vaccine rabbit hole leads to political representation: the case of Twitter in Japan
