Online Foreign Propaganda Campaigns and Vaccine Misinformation: A Comparative Analysis

The 2016 U.S. elections, the Brexit vote, and other events in recent years have raised public and scholarly awareness around massive foreign propaganda efforts (Jamieson, 2018; Walter et al., 2020). While much academic attention has been given to the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) and, particularly, their attempt to influence the American political landscape before, during, and after the 2016 U.S. Presidential elections (Benkler et al., 2018; Jamieson, 2018), Russia was far from the only country to deploy social-media propaganda campaigns aimed at influencing U.S. and Western public opinion. More-recent studies have highlighted both the influence of other foreign actors as well as the influence of these actors in domains that are not explicitly related to electoral politics, such as popular culture (Bay, 2018) and genetic engineering (Dorius & Lawrence-Dill, 2018).