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This study aims to examine the relationship between various types of literacy on one hand and identification of misinformation and dissemination of such information on the other, in search for better countermeasures against misinformation.

Based on data from a large-scale survey, models are constructed and analyzed to assess the relationships of literacy with both the identification of inaccuracies and dissemination behavior.

Regarding the identification of misinformation, individuals with high critical thinking attitudes (subjective literacy) are less likely to recognize misinformation, while other objective literacies do not have a significant relationship. Regarding dissemination behavior, individuals with high information literacy, media literacy and critical thinking scores tend not to disseminate misinformation, whereas those with high critical thinking attitudes are more likely to disseminate such information.

First, it quantitatively elucidates the relationships various literacies have with the accuracy judgment and dissemination behavior of misinformation. This highlights the effectiveness of objective indicators of literacies and the need for caution regarding subjective literacy – i.e. self-confidence in their own literacy. Second, it provides a cross-disciplinary analysis of the relationships, covering not only oft-studied politics and health care but also various other fields, thereby identifying comprehensive literacy strategies against misinformation. Third, it addresses differences in dissemination methods and offers insights into more practical countermeasures.

In recent years, the social impact of misinformation has intensified. The purpose of this study is to clarify the mechanism by which misinformation spreads in society.

Testing the following two hypotheses by a logit model analysis of survey data using actual fact-checked COVID-19 vaccine and political misinformation: people who believe that some misinformation is true are more likely to spread it than those who do not believe in its truthfulness; people with lower media and information literacy are more likely to spread misinformation than people with higher media and information literacy.

The two hypotheses are supported, and the trend was generally robust regardless of the method, whether the means of diffusion was social media or direct conversation.

The authors derived the following four implications from the results: governments need to further promote media information literacy education; platform service providers should consider mechanisms to facilitate the spread and display of posts by people who are aware of misinformation; fact-checking should be further promoted; people should acquire information based on the assumption that people who believe in some misinformation tend to spread it more.

First, it quantitatively clarifies the relationship between misinformation, true/false judgements and dissemination behaviour. Second, it quantitatively clarifies the relationship between literacy and misinformation dissemination behaviour. Third, it conducts a comprehensive analysis of diffusion behaviours, including those outside of social media.

This study aims to reveal how the COVID-19 vaccine was accepted in the Japanese Twitter-sphere. This study explores how the topics related to the vaccine promotion project changed on Twitter and how the topics that were likely to spread changed during the vaccine promotion project.

The computational social science methodology was adopted. This study collected all tweets containing the word “vaccine” using the Twitter API from March to October 2021 and conducted the following analysis: analyzing frequent words and identifying topics likely to spread through the cosine similarity and Tobit model.

First, vaccine hesitancy–related words were frequently mentioned during the vaccine introduction and dissemination periods and had diffusing power only during the former period. Second, vaccine administration–related words were frequently mentioned and diffused through April to May and had diffusing power throughout the period. The background to these findings is that the sentiment of longing for vaccines outweighed that of hesitancy toward vaccines during this period.

This study finds that the timing of the rise in vaccine hesitation sentiment and the timing of the start of vaccine supply were misaligned. This is one of the reasons that Japan, which originally exhibited strong vaccine hesitancy, did not face vaccine hesitancy in the COVID-19 vaccine promotion project.