ABSTRACT
This study investigates why the Corona-Warn-App, which was meticulously designed in Germany to interrupt the COVID-19’s chain of infection, was not installed by the majority of the population and therefore failed to achieve what it was created to do. We collect natural language data by scraping 70,529 related comments from Twitter, and apply sentiment analysis to understand the content. We distinguish negative comments into two categories: technical issues, e.g. crashes and errors, and trust-related issues, e.g. concerns about privacy protection. After a more detailed manual check, we find that some criticisms of the app are not accurate. Surprisingly, more than 40% of trust-related denunciations are based purely on misinformation spread by users. For example, a user complains about a violation of data privacy, when, in fact, the app is fully GDPR-compliant. Our study provides evidence for the intentional promulgation of misinformation to lower trust in life-saving technologies during a pandemic, and calls for a more careful evaluation of the technology’s performance. © 2022, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.