Announcing the Virality Project

Anti-vaccine disinformation will pose significant challenges to the rollout and public adoption of COVID-19 vaccines in the United States. The anti-vaccine movement has well-developed online networks and expertise in leveraging social channels to spread its messages. These networked activism efforts have linked longtime anti-vaccine activists, health and wellness influencers, those who object to vaccination requirements as government overreach,  and politically-driven communities who have actively amplified COVID and other conspiracies. The movement is experienced, well-funded, and able to generate in-the-streets action. It has already begun to expend significant efforts to enter mainstream conversation and erode confidence in COVID-19 vaccines.

The Virality Project is a coalition of research entities focused on supporting real-time information exchange between the disinformation research community, public health officials, civil society organizations, government agencies, and social media platforms. Our objective is to detect, analyze, and respond to incidents of false and misleading narratives related to COVID-19 vaccines across online ecosystems, enabling civil society and health communicators to ultimately mitigate the impact of narratives which might otherwise undermine the public’s confidence in the safety of evidence-based policies in the United States. 

The Partnership consists of analysts across six of the nation’s leading institutions focused on analysis of mis- and disinformation in the social media landscape: the Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, New York University’s Center for Social Media and Politics and Tandon School of Engineering, Graphika, and the National Conference on Citizenship. Members of this coalition bring with them the insights gained from their previous collaboration on the Election Integrity Partnership which, during the 2020 Election, coordinated the work of 120 analysts, published 32 blogposts on findings, and worked directly with platform partners to respond to over 800 unique incidents of election-related disinformation. 

In the coming weeks, we expect to add more institutions as core research collaborators. We look forward to a full launch webinar involving all of these organizations at that point. 

The Virality Project will provide actionable situational awareness and response capabilities for public health officials and other partners on the front lines of providing accurate vaccine-related information to the public. Public officials, civil society, and health sector organizations can reach the team at info@viralityproject.org.