Anti-vaccination movement on Facebook: Present-day discourses centre around moral outrage and structural oppression by institutional government & the media, suggesting a strong logic of ‘conspiracy-style’ beliefs and thinking. Furthermore, the vast majority of participants are women

Mapping the anti-vaccination movement on Facebook. Naomi Smith & Tim Graham. Information, Communication & Society, https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2017.1418406

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

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My comment: could this be related? Sex Differences in Disgust: Why Are Women More Easily Disgusted Than Men? Laith Al-Shawaf, David M.G. Lewis, David M. Buss. Emotion Review, http://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2017/11/why-are-women-more-easily-disgusted.html