Effects of Media Literacy and Polarisation on Vaccine Take-Up in Taiwan

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Trisha Lin, whose focus is on health misinformation in the context of COVID-19. Such misinformation is damaging and highly politicised, and the present study examines this for the context of Taiwan’s polarised political system. The present study conducted a quantitative survey to examine the interplay between misinformation, polarisation, media literacy, and vaccination acceptance in Taiwan, therefore.

In principle, Taiwan responded well to the COVID-19 crisis, but had a major lockdown in May to August 2021 and suffered from considerable foreign cyberattacks during this time; vaccination take-up was also somewhat slow, and affected by political partisanship. Health literacy also affected vaccine take-up, and such literacy may have been aligned with attitudes towards misinformation.

The project conducted a representative Web survey of some 750 Taiwanese social media users, and found that attitudes towards misinformation as well as media literacy strongly predicted COVID-19 health literacy as well as misinformation detection. Concerns about misinformation and strong media literacy enabled people to make informed health choices about COVID-19. Ideological polarisation also weakly predicted COVID-19 health literacy; most strongly for highly ideologised individuals. Health literacy was also positively associated with vaccine acceptance, while political polarisation had a mild negative effect on vaccine acceptance.