Social media connects people and amplifies different aspects of humanity in good and bad ways. But the effects of social media appear neither universally good nor bad, but rather present an oscillating, dynamic system that can be divisive but also uniting, a new UC Davis study suggests.

Despite vaccine availability, vaccine hesitancy has inhibited public health officials’ efforts to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, which has killed more than 1 million people in the U.S. and nearly 6 million people worldwide.

As COVID-19 upended societal norms when it swept through the United States in 2020, a second pandemic — or “infodemic” — was also on the rise. An analysis of Twitter users by researchers at UC Davis and the University of Texas, Austin, suggests that Republican-identifying people who believe their local government has positive intentions are vulnerable to believing politically fueled COVID-19 misinformation. The study did not find the same trend among Democrat-identifying Twitter users.

Facebook recently awarded two grants to the Department of Communication researchers in the UC Davis College of Letters and Science to study misinformation and polarization on social media.

The project titles and researchers are:

While a life-altering pandemic has caused a substantial uptick in anxiety and depression symptoms among adults and children alike, LGBTQ+ youth have turned to peers in anonymous online discussion forums for support. New research from UC Davis suggests these LGBTQ+ teenagers — who already experience disproportionate levels of psychological adversity — exhibited increased anxiety on the popular r/LGBTeens subreddit throughout 2020 and the start of 2021.

Social media misinformation can negatively influence people’s attitudes about vaccine safety and effectiveness, but credible organizations — such as research universities and health institutions — can play a pivotal role in debunking myths with simple tags that link to factual information, UC Davis researchers suggest in a new study.