Retraction: The anti-vaccination infodemic on social media: A behavioral analysis

• Published in: PloS one Vol. 17; no. 12; p. e0279796
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Public Library of Science 22.12.2022; Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subjects: Retraction
• ISSN: 1932-6203; 1932-6203
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0279796

[...]the use of a random word generator to create a random hashtag to use as control is inappropriate and suggests that the study did not include an appropriate characterization of underlying Twitter behavior. * The study does not provide an adequate definition of “emotional language”, and the related results reporting on the use of emotional language include an outlier data-point in the pro-vaccine group, which could drive the effect significantly in a study with a small sample size. * The network analysis includes only a small number of profiles with an unbalanced number of neighbors. The authors also state that the confidence interval is missing from Fig 5C because the analysis represents a snapshot of the Twitter connections at the time of analysis, and that the data rely on an n = 1 data point. A subject expert assessed the authors’ response and commented that the difference in number of connections between groups is not a sufficient reason to not find an equivalently sized control group in the vaccine community to support the additional analyses, beyond counting neighbors of a small group of users.