INFODEMIA NA ERA DA COVID-19: UMA ANÁLISE DOS DISCURSOS ANTIVACINA NAS REDES SOCIAIS

Abstract

Over the past decade, anti-vaccine movements have gained momentum, fueled by social media. The resurgence of diseases such as measles and polio has become a global concern, also affecting Brazil. Since 2015, a decline in coverage of the National Immunization Program has been observed, a trend exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic. During this period, vaccines and their efficacy became central topics in public discourse, a focus that was intensified by the direct influence of digital platforms and their sophisticated information networks, which anti-vaccine movements have extensively used to spread vaccine hesitancy. This study analyzes anti-vaccine discourses on Twitter (now X) in Brazil, using Lexical Multidimensional Analysis (Berber Sardinha, 2016, 2017, 2020, 2021).  to examine a corpus of 16,841 tweets. After tagging, lemmatization, and factor analysis, three discursive dimensions were identified: (1) Warnings about booster dose risks in young people versus Resistance to compulsory measures against Covid-19, (2) Political-conspiracy theories versus Pseudoscientific evidence against vaccines, and (3) Advocacy for early treatment versus Personal accounts of vaccine side effects. This research contributes to the understanding of anti-vaccine discourses in Brazil on social media, providing a empirical evidence for addressing vaccine hesitancy and misinformation.