Population Control, Deadly Vaccines, and Mutant Mosquitoes: The Construction and Circulation of Zika Virus Conspiracy Theories Online
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background Disease outbreaks are often accompanied by sensationalist news media coverage, social media panic, and a barrage of conspiracy theories and misinformation. The Zika virus outbreak of 2015ߝ2016 followed this pattern. Analysis Drawing on frame analysis, this article examines the construction and circulation of a conspiracy theory concerning the 2015ߝ2016 Zika outbreak, analyzing the flow of misinformation across online platforms including “conspiracy” websites, online discussion threads, and Twitter. Conclusion and implications Conspiracy theories produced and shared on social and digital media platforms have the power to discursively construct contagious diseases such as Zika, which may fuel misguided public perceptions and impact health policy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.035 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".