Tuesday, May 02, 2023

Channels of Antivax Doctors Continue To Thrive on Telegram (Portuguese)

Country:
BRAZIL

Authors:

Chloé Pinheiro
GRANTEE


Henrique Rieger
GUEST CONTRIBUTOR


Rodolfo Almeida
GUEST CONTRIBUTOR

ENGLISH
Project
Brazil, the New Stronghold of the Antivax Movement

READ MORE ABOUT THIS PROJECT


The following is an English summary of the story "Canais de médicos antivacina continuam bombando no Telegram." After the summary is the full story, written in Portuguese for Núcleo.

There’s a mistaken consensus that people are no longer interested in antivax messages, now that the worst of the pandemic is over. In this story, we show that antivax channels and groups in Telegram, a messaging app used worldwide, are still engaging millions of people, even in 2023.

To do this, we used data mining tools to build a dashboard with 56 channels and groups. Henrique Rieger, a data scientist who works for Núcleo, gathered numbers on visualizations and shares on these profiles, and we then analyzed the data to extract insights about this network.

Among the main findings, we discovered that messages in spaces related to physicians were seen over 190 million times between 2020 and 2023. In 2022, when media coverage about the subject was diminishing, views on these channels doubled from 79 to 167 million views.

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