Study of Anti-Vaxx movement on Facebook

Post Reply New Topic

Social media chat on anti-vaccination Facebook pages is led by a tone of moral outrage, plus a strong belief in the oppressive nature of governments and the media. What’s more, the vast majority of participants are women.

That’s according to a new study of six public anti-vaccination Facebook pages, with hundreds of thousands of Likes between them, using a variety of data analysis methods.

While these pages cover a wide area in terms of geographical regions, the people doing most of the commenting actually represent a much smaller subset, the research reveals, suggesting social media plays a key role in fanning the flames of anti-vaxxer feeling

Previous research has shown that anti-vaccination websites make much better use of interactive tools like comments, forums, and social media, than pro-vaccination sites, which tend to act more like static libraries of information.

To dig deeper into the online anti-vaxxer communities, Naomi Smith from Federation University Australia and Tim Graham from Australian National University looked at the structure of the six hand-picked Facebook pages, the gender balance, and the main recurring discussion topics.

The pages analysed were Fans of the AVN, Dr. Tenpenny on Vaccines, Great Mothers (and Others) Questioning Vaccines, No Vaccines Australia, Age of Autism, and Rage Against the Vaccines.

In total, these pages had 231,491 Likes at the time the study was carried out (December 2015).

By scraping three years’ worth of data, the researchers found that most of the page followers had only liked posts once or twice – the vast majority of the online activity was generated by a smaller group of people. Commenting activity also suggested most users were transient or just occasionally passing through the pages.

Using first names as a rough guide to gender, the study found an average of a 1:3 male to female ratio in terms of users following these pages. In terms of the most active users, men were even more outnumbered.

Meanwhile, using a maths modelling approach known as the Latent Dirichlet allocation, the researchers also picked out the most common topics on these boards: activism, governance, media and censorship, and vaccination as genocide all scored highly.

Other topics frequently mentioned were the Zika virus, the (pro-vaccine) Gates Foundation, moral transgressions, vaccine injuries, and chemtrails (the basis of another popular conspiracy theory).