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Supplemental materials for preprint: Understanding and Quantifying Anti-Vaccine Misinformation Online: A Critical Report and Social Media Analysis About Emeritus Professor Timothy Noakes
No full textUnderstanding and Quantifying Anti-Vaccine Misinformation Online: A Critical Report and Social Media Analysis About Emeritus Professor Timothy Noakes
No full textAlmost a fifth of South Africans fear that vaccines are unsafe. South Africa has indeed been a target of many anti-vaccination lobbying websites with claims and concerns regarding safety, the risk of adverse events, thimerosal, idiopathic illnesses including autism, and ‘vaccine-injured’ children. This seems to have contributed to the anti-immunization rumors and resistance within South Africa. Unfortunately, South African scientist, Timothy Noakes, has disseminated several expressions, claims, retweets, and re-publications about vaccines that are not based on truthful, accurate or up to date scientific information. This misinformation about vaccines that have been expressed, shared, and or spread can be deemed as irresponsible, unscientific, and a potential public health threat. Such information spread online can have and has had a major impact on critical thinking, vaccine acceptance, parental decisions, and even disease outbreaks. Upon analysis of Tim Noakes’ social media, there is a substantial amount of evidence for concern. From June to December 2019 there was a statistically significant increase in the number of followers Noakes gained that also aligned with anti-vaccine views. As for the content that Noakes himself has shared and expressed, 90% were Anti-Vaccine in nature, while only 10% were Pro-Vaccine. The potential maximum number of exposures to this anti-vaccine misinformation and rhetoric are in the millions, with approximately 3 million exposures in 2019 alone and 4 million in total from 2014 to 2019. The claim that Noakes has not shared anti-vaccine misinformation is terribly weak and not based on the evidence. Continuing to spread this misinformation is a complete contradiction to what Noakes stands for, what others in his profession stand for, and what his own country’s regulatory body, as well as international organizations, stand for.
This paper investigates common anti-vaccine misinformation shared by Tim Noakes and is also a social media analysis that covers anti-vaccine tropes and content. This paper also doubles as a literature review on the spread of misinformation in general, and more specifically, anti-vaccine misinformation. A separate section is dedicated to the topic of cancer misinformation which demonstrates the convergence between misleading cancer and vaccine ideologies.
The conclusions made in this paper are not all conclusive and there is room for flexibility — what is written is also meant to stimulate further input and discussion. Given the personal and emotive nature of the topic, it should be emphasized that what is written is with a non-malicious intent and should be perceived as in the interest of public health and online safety.
This case with Tim Noakes acts as a vehicle to highlight and learn more about several aspects of vaccine hesitancy, the anti-vaccine movement, social media, and misinformation in general
Supplemental materials for preprint: Understanding and Quantifying Anti-Vaccine Misinformation Online: A Critical Report and Social Media Analysis About Emeritus Professor Timothy Noakes
No full text
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
2020 UPDATE on the Critical Report and Social Media Analysis About Emeritus Professor Timothy Noakes
No full textThis paper acts as a brief update on the events and postings of 2020 regarding anti-vaccine related misinformation online.
In a recent blog post, Tim Noakes continued to spread anti-vaccine misinformation and common anti-vaccine/vaccine hesitant tropes. Such misinformation included the flawed science done by anti-vaccine activist, Brian Hooker. This was used to defend Noakes’ 2014 social media post on Twitter that also included anti-vaccine misinformation (a video directed by Andrew Wakefield with the false autism-vaccine connection and CDC “coverup” conspiracy). He calls on Nathan Geffen, PhD to remove a previous article about him due to concerns about potential falsehoods, but Noakes has failed to do this with the very factual errors he has expressed and spread, which indeed can have public health consequences. Noakes also doubles down by implying support to the discredited, flawed paper by Andrew Wakefield.
Previously, Noakes’ social media had been assessed for not just what type of anti-vaccine misinformation was spread, but how much. This included observations of an increasing relationship between those who follow Noakes on Twitter, and those who also follow anti-vaccine accounts — this relationship has continued to increase dramatically in 2020. Noakes has continued to support several anti-vaccine leaders, such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his organization Children’s Health Defense, and now recently Judy Mikovits and her documentary “Plandemic”. When assessing the overall vaccine narrative that Noakes broadcasts to his audience, it seems that 93% of it has been anti-vaccine in nature. Furthermore, in the first four months of 2020, Tim Noakes generated a maximum of ~7 million exposures to anti-vaccine misinformation. Across all tweets from August 2014 to May 7th, 2020, this number adds up to a staggering 11 million possible exposures. The claim that Noakes “is not anti-vaccine” and has not shared anti-vaccine misinformation is terribly weak and not based on the evidence.
Noakes has spread, expressed, and supported unscientific, disproven claims and the majority of what he has shared about vaccines is dangerous to public health and can cause harm to the reputation of those in his profession. Continuing to do so, as he has done, is a complete contradiction to what Noakes stands for, what others in his profession stand for, and what his own country’s regulatory body, as well as international organizations, stand for
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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