  Currently, the significance of social media in disseminating noteworthy
information on topics such as health, politics, and the economy is
indisputable. During the COVID-19 pandemic, anti-vaxxers use social media to
distribute fake news and anxiety-provoking information about the vaccine, which
may harm the public. Here, we characterize the psycho-linguistic features of
anti-vaxxers on the online social network Twitter. For this, we collected
COVID-19 related tweets from February 2020 to June 2021 to analyse vaccination
stance, linguistic features, and social network characteristics. Our results
demonstrated that, compared to pro-vaxxers, anti-vaxxers tend to have more
negative emotions, narrative thinking, and worse moral tendencies. This study
can advance our understanding of the online anti-vaccination movement, and
become critical for social media management and policy action during and after
the pandemic.
