COVID-19 vaccine conspiracy theories, discourses of liberty, and “the new normal” on social media
Journal: Linguistics Vanguard
Year: 2025

Abstract Public distrust in government, pharmaceutical companies, healthcare professions, and medical science and technology has been consistently linked with vaccine rejection. Policymakers, therefore, want to better understand links between distrust of institutions and vaccine refusal. This paper reports on a case study of posts (tweets) to the social media platform Twitter (now X) collected as part of the TRAC:COVID (Trust and Communication: A Coronavirus Online Visual Dashboard) project. The