The spread of misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccines in Central and Eastern Europe

A rapidly growing literature is concerned with understanding the drivers of individuals' propensity to spread misinformation on social media. In light of the global COVID-19 pandemic and the widespread dissemination of misinformation about vaccines on the internet, it seems more important than ever to understand how to improve individuals' ability to distinguish between true and false news. In this article, we argue that right-wing authoritarian predispositions play a central role in the spread of misinformation about vaccines. The influence of such predispositions should be particularly pronounced when people make affective decisions, which is common in their real-life social media behaviour. To test these hypotheses, we rely on an innovative JavaScript-based experiment conducted in two Central and Eastern European countries with a particularly high prevalence of misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines: Hungary and Romania. The results of our study support the idea that right-wing authoritarian predispositions significantly amplify the spread of misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines. The influence of such predispositions can also be mitigated only to a limited extent if individuals' attention is explicitly drawn to the accuracy of the information. By highlighting the limitations of what has proven to be one of the most promising interventions against the spread of fake news on social media, our findings have important implications for our understanding of social polarisation and conflict during the COVID-19 crisis.