  There is a lot of fact-based information and misinformation in the online
discourses and discussions about the COVID-19 vaccines. Using a sample of
nearly four million geotagged English tweets and the data from the CDC COVID
Data Tracker, we conducted the Fama-MacBeth regression with the Newey-West
adjustment to understand the influence of both misinformation and fact-based
news on Twitter on the COVID-19 vaccine uptake in the U.S. from April 19 when
U.S. adults were vaccine eligible to June 30, 2021, after controlling
state-level factors such as demographics, education, and the pandemic severity.
We identified the tweets related to either misinformation or fact-based news by
analyzing the URLs. One percent increase in fact-related Twitter users is
associated with an approximately 0.87 decrease (B = -0.87, SE = 0.25, p<.001)
in the number of daily new vaccinated people per hundred. No significant
relationship was found between the percentage of fake-news-related users and
the vaccination rate. The negative association between the percentage of
fact-related users and the vaccination rate might be due to a combination of a
larger user-level influence and the negative impact of online social
endorsement on vaccination intent.
