Mapping the anti-vaccination movement on Facebook

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Anti-vaccination
• social network analysis
• topic modelling
• social network sites
• social media

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Naomi Smith is a Lecturer in Sociology in the School of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Federation University Australia (Gippsland). She received her PhD in Sociology of The University of Queensland. Her current research projects examine intersection of health and wellness practices, physical spaces and social media [email: [email protected]].

Tim Graham is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Australian National University, Australia, with a joint appointment in the Research School of Social Science and the Research School of Computer Science. His research combines social theory and computationally-intensive approaches to analysing, understanding, and predicting social phenomena. The holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Queensland [email: [email protected]].

Notes

1 Countries such as France issue fines for non-compliance. Similar legislation removing personal belief exemption has also been passed in California and Australia (Klapdor & Grove, 2015).

2 Doxing is the publication of private and/or identifying information of a particular individual on the Internet. Typically doxing is a malicious act design to threaten, intimidate, or harass.

3 The limit of 1000 was set by the Facebook API specifications at the time of data collection.

4 The graph theory literature often uses the term ‘vertex’, but we will use the less formal term ‘node’.

5 In this study, we used a binary classification of gender, namely, male and female. The primary rationale for such an approach was due to the limited capacities of gender modelling tools and existing data.

6 Currently the Facebook API does not provide data for individual post ‘shares’, but does provide a total sum of shares for public posts.