Public thoughts on incentivizing COVID-19 vaccine uptake in the United States: testing hostile media bias with user-generated comments

Sherice Gearhart; Ioana A Coman; Alexander Moe; Sydney E Brammer

doi:10.3389/fsoc.2023.1041454

Public thoughts on incentivizing COVID-19 vaccine uptake in the United States: testing hostile media bias with user-generated comments

Front Sociol. 2023 Oct 31:8:1041454. doi: 10.3389/fsoc.2023.1041454. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Sherice Gearhart¹, Ioana A Coman¹, Alexander Moe², Sydney E Brammer¹

Affiliations

¹ Department of Public Relations and Strategic Management Communication, College of Media and Communication, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX, United States.
² The State University of New York (SUNY) Brockport, Brockport, NY, United States.

Abstract

Facebook is the most popular social media platform and often used by news organizations to distribute content to broad audiences. Features of this online news environment, especially user-generated comments shown to news consumers, have the potential to induce audience perceptions of hostile media bias. This study furthers investigation into the influence of exposure to Facebook comments and news topics on consumers. Using a sample of U.S. adult Facebook users (N = 1,274), this work utilized a 2 (likeminded comments or disagreeable comments) × 2 (story topic of requiring COVID-19 vaccines to receive a monetary bonus or maintain employment) between-subjects experimental design. While controlling for the influence of partisanship, this work further proves that features of the Facebook environment uniquely influence news audience perceptions of neutral news content. Specifically, findings indicate that news story topic can influence perceptions of bias. Further, topic and comment exposure interacted, demonstrating the intensity of story topic and likeminded comments enhance hostile media perceptions.

Keywords: COVID-19; Facebook; comments; hostile media bias; news; perception.

Grants and funding

This work was completed with grant funding from the Waterhouse Family Institute for the Study of Communication and Society (WFI Grant Number: 20210076). Open access publication fees were supplied by Texas Tech University and the College of Media and Communication at Texas Tech University.