COVID-19 and the Global Health Threat of "V accine Hesitancy". Analyzing anti-vax Discourses in Brazilian Portuguese and in German on Twitter

On March 11, 2020, the WHO declared the Novel Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) outbreak as a pandemic. Along with that, discussions regarding vaccination have revived anti-vaccine movements around the globe. Social media play a key role in the spread of disinformation and conspiracy narratives (Maci 2019). Having that in mind, this study's objective is to describe discursive patterns and arguments of anti-vax campaigns posted on Twitter in Brazilian Portuguese and in German in January 2021 under the hashtags #vacina and #impfung. This piece of research relies on Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (KhosraviNik 2018) and made use of a software-based corpus linguistic approach to identify recurrent themes and textual patterns in anti-vax campaigns. Linguistic resources were examined with a focus on the Transitivity System proposed by Halliday and Matthiessen (2004, 2014). The comparative analysis has shown that the socio-political context in which the users formulate the Tweets clearly shapes the German and Brazilian Portuguese anti-vax Tweets. At the same time, similarities were found in terms of the discursive patterns of anti-vax arguments. These include a strong focus on interrogative statements and a de- and recontextualization of discourses originally put forward by (historically) marginalized groups to construct anti-vax activists as victims of a "dictatorship of pro-vaccine policies". To address issues such as "vaccine hesitancy", it is necessary to understand arguments and ideologies that support and are spread through anti-vax movements. Analyzing anti-vax discourses in Brazilian Portuguese and German has been a first step to provide new insights from a context-sensitive and language- comparative perspective.