Mapping the anti-vaccination movement on Facebook

TLDR

Anti‑vaccination rhetoric has entered mainstream discourse and is amplified by social media, creating online spaces that strengthen and popularise such discourses. The study examines the characteristics and discourses of six popular anti‑vaccination Facebook pages. The authors analyze large‑scale datasets with social network analysis, gender prediction from census data, and Latent Dirichlet allocation topic modeling. The analysis reveals that anti‑vaccination Facebook pages center on moral outrage, perceived institutional oppression, and conspiracy thinking, are predominantly female, exhibit small‑world comment sub‑networks, and suggest social media sustains a large, global, durable movement.

Abstract

Over the past decade, anti-vaccination rhetoric has become part of the mainstream discourse regarding the public health practice of childhood vaccination. These utilise social media to foster online spaces that strengthen and popularise anti-vaccination discourses. In this paper, we examine the characteristics of and the discourses present within six popular anti-vaccination Facebook pages. We examine these large-scale datasets using a range of methods, including social network analysis, gender prediction using historical census data, and generative statistical models for topic analysis (Latent Dirichlet allocation). We find that present-day discourses centre around moral outrage and structural oppression by institutional government and the media, suggesting a strong logic of ‘conspiracy-style’ beliefs and thinking. Furthermore, anti-vaccination pages on Facebook reflect a highly ‘feminised’ movement ‒ the vast majority of participants are women. Although anti-vaccination networks on Facebook are large and global in scope, the comment activity sub-networks appear to be ‘small world’. This suggests that social media may have a role in spreading anti-vaccination ideas and making the movement durable on a global scale.