COVID Vaccines and Online Personal Messaging: The Challenge of Challenging Everyday Misinformation

"Can society develop better understanding of the social norms shaping how people encounter and appraise vaccine misinformation when they use personal messaging? Can such understanding be used to inform design principles for new forms of public health communication that take the unique context of personal messaging into account?"

Confidence in vaccines depends on people's everyday social interactions, including those that happen in digital communications. The COVID-19 pandemic has generated myriad vaccination-related rumours and conspiracy theories, a problem that has troubled communication researchers and practitioners. However, personal messaging (i.e., private social media or encrypted messaging apps such as WhatsApp) is a medium for which there are no quick technological "fixes" for the spread of misinformation. Based in the Online Civic Culture Centre (O3C) and the Centre for Research in Communication and Culture at Loughborough University, the Everyday Misinformation Project is a three-year study whose aim is to understand why people share and correct misinformation online, with a focus on personal messaging. The aim of this report, which is the first of two-public facing reports from the project, is to uncover the social norms that shape whether and how people do or do not challenge misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines on online personal messaging.

As the report explains, personal messaging provides ongoing connection to others, sustaining the habitual interactions that generate and then reinforce social norms. Social scientists have demonstrated that our thinking about how to behave is shaped, in part, by our perception that others in our social networks think a certain way or that others acting as a group have better information than lone individuals. The way we respond to information and misinformation shared on personal messaging is also important for signalling the importance of norms to others in our networks. Norm-based behaviours can quickly diffuse across social networks, as more and more people perceive that joining consensus by adhering to a norm is less cumbersome, more personally beneficial, or more likely to help them fit in or enhance their social status.

WhatsApp's lack of public archives and its end-to-end encryption means researchers, journalists, regulators, and even the companies themselves cannot comprehensively identify, measure, and quantify the impact of the misinformation circulating on personal messaging. This encryption also means that automated interventions to tackle misinformation on public social media - for instance, schemes to algorithmically downrank anti-vaccination posts and accounts - have no relevance on WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.

Furthermore, communication in the context of high levels of interpersonal trust - which tends to characterise personal messaging - may increase the likelihood that misinformation goes unchallenged. One reason is that most people want to avoid conflict with their close ties. But part of what makes personal messaging so complex is that it differs from the many public online spaces in which people congregate to discuss specific interests or promote specific values or identities. On personal messaging apps, people talk about a wide variety of topics and often switch rapidly between sharing or encountering personal information and public information ("hybrid public-interpersonal communication"). This characteristic of the medium can make conflict avoidance more important, especially for dealing with discussion of public or political values.

The project's fieldwork has three strands; the present study draws on the first: longitudinal in-depth qualitative interviews with 102 members of the public based in three regions of the United Kingdom, recruited to reflect the diversity of British society in terms of age, gender, ethnicity, educational attainment, and digital literacy. (Additional strands include: analysis of personal messaging content the participants voluntarily upload to personal online diaries via a mobile smartphone app; and multi-wave nationally representative panel surveys, to be designed based on findings from the first two strands.)

Selected findings include:

• Discussion of vaccines mostly happens in small messaging groups among family and/or friends, where people know each other well and tend to trust each other. When people encounter vaccine misinformation in larger personal messaging groups (e.g., among school parents or work colleagues), they fear that if they try to correct it they will be seen as undermining group cohesion by provoking conflict. Furthermore, they worry about their command of facts about the safety of COVID-19 vaccines and perceive these risks to be greater when there is a more "public" or "semi-public" context of a larger messaging group to consider.
• Some people draw boundaries between what they see as the world of public and political communication, where they think there is a norm is that it is legitimate to challenge misinformation, and the interpersonal world of personal messaging, where the norm is that misinformation should go unchallenged because it is not appropriate to call it out.
• Seeing misinformation leads some people to disengage from vaccine talk on personal messaging. That is, they see the problematic nature of misinformation-laden posts but do not speak up. These signals of tacit acceptance in a family, friend, or school group can enhance the legitimacy of misinformation and contribute to its further spread.
• Some people try to find routes around the norm of conflict avoidance - for example, by sharing criticisms of vaccine misinformation in encounters they perceive to be less risky. Some people scale up and down between different groups, both large and small, or use one-to-one messaging to gauge others' experiences and opinions. But, even while building solidarity among those positive about vaccination, these practices also represent missed opportunities to address misinformation in contexts where it can gain oxygen and continue to spread.
• Yet challenging vaccine misinformation overtly can backfire and lead people to exit dialogue. Vaccination talk is then deemed "off limits", leaving personal messaging to continue but only on the basis of safer, less conflict-ridden topics.

Based on these findings, the report outlines some broad principles for slowing the spread of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation on personal messaging through health communication interventions that:

• Are person focused, not content focused;
• Balance people's desire to maintain healthy relationships with friends, family members, and the other communities to which they belong with the need to foster healthy relationships with public health information;
• Encourage people to scale up from the high-trust, one-to-one, and small-group interactions to larger groups, where people can work together to support each other in dialogue-based challenges to misinformation, avoiding the risk of standing out as lone individuals;
• Encourage people to scale down by discussing how to correct misinformation in groups and then taking the lessons learned down to one-to-one exchanges; and
• Foster an empathetic, dialogical orientation toward others - rather than antagonism.

"Such interventions could help people overcome the emotional contradictions they experience when members of their networks share misinformation."

In conclusion: "Social norms do not emerge spontaneously. They must be maintained by people themselves. Those who are enthusiastic about vaccination still need clear information but they also need effective ways to share it with others in personal messaging. Without these, the vaccine positive will lack the ability to signal their experiences in ways that signal that vaccines are safe and effective."