本ラボを修了した、早稲田大学大学院 政治学研究科ジャーナリズムコース 修士課程修了生の論文概要書です。
Author: Y.R. （2022年9月卒業）
Abstract
Vaccinations have an integral role in combating the COVID-19 pandemic. Although vaccination rates have increased since the beginning of the pandemic, vaccines are not always accepted by everyone, which is expressed in the form of vaccine skepticism. In addition, the strong feelings of uncertainty caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has created a situation for conspiracy theories to flourish (Enders & Uscinski, 2020a). In Japan, events such as the declaration of the state of emergency and increase in COVID-19 cases may increase conspiracy theories amongst vaccine skeptics. Facebook is a platform that allows the spread of such conspiracy theories and misinformation, but research on vaccine skepticism within the Japanese Facebook environment is minimal. It is important that this area is explored as Facebook is one of the most popular social media sites, in which vaccine skepticism spread through Facebook can lead to non-health protective behaviours (Allington et al., 2020).
This paper uses CrowdTangle, a public insight tool provided by Meta, in order to obtain COVID-19 vaccine skeptic posts. Content analysis by human coding was conducted to determine what Japanese Facebook users were skeptic about regarding the COVID-19 vaccine and whether conspiracy theories of such skeptic content increased due to the rise of social tensions in Japan. The research found five key results: 1) conspiracy theories were the most common vaccine skeptic content within the Japanese Facebook environment, 2) religion and morality based vaccine skeptic content were the least common, 3) specific skeptic topics being focused on change depending on the timing of the pandemic, 4) conspiracy theories increase when a wide vaccine promoting policy is implemented, 5) conspiracy theories became more active a month or two after the state of emergency declaration. This paper gives light to a new area in understanding vaccine skepticism within Japanese social media. While the effects of the state of emergency declaration on conspiracy theories is not entirely clear, vaccine policy makers should be aware of conspiracy theories when implementing vaccine promoting policies. Based on these results, future research conducted on a larger and longer scale for exploring Japanese vaccine skepticism is recommended.