The Role of Influencers and Echo Chambers in the Diffusion of Vaccine Misinformation: Opinion Mining in a Taiwanese Online Community

Although the forum exhibits a resilience to echo chambering, active users and brokers contribute significantly to the polarization of the community, particularly through propaganda-style misinformation. This popularity of propaganda-style misinformation may be linked to the political nature of the forum, where public opinion follows "elite cues" on issues, as observed in the United States. The work in this study corroborates this finding and contributes a data point in a non-Western context. To manage the echo chambering of misinformation, more effort can be put into moderating these users to prevent polarization and the spread of misinformation to prevent growing vaccine hesitancy.