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.
youcanteatbullets on December 28th, 2017 at 01:01 UTC »
So a little bit of background. Women overall use facebook more than men; about 83% of women use Facebook compared to 79% of men source: pew. Previous work on social media, including Facebook individuals and Twitter has found 'small-world' type behavior, such as the 'six degrees of separation' phenomenon. So that's not surprising. There's some cool stuff here though.
1:3 is way stronger than 79:83. The authors speculate this may be due to the gendered nature of parenting (women being more likely to be primary caregivers).
As far as the 'small world' bit:
Yeah, no big shock there.
There's some interesting topic modelling, that was my favorite part:
Mildly related:
The golden age of anti-vaccine conspiracies
Jake_Science on December 28th, 2017 at 00:20 UTC »
It's pretty interesting that the network has small world characteristics, but not super surprising. Most human networks have small world connections. The easiest way to describe that is a node (in this case, an anti-vaxxer) with many short connections (close friends within a similar circle) and few long-range connections (presumably family and high school friends in much different social circles).
Small world networks were named by Stanley Milgram (yes, the obedience guy), who ran into a man who lived in the same town he did while on vacation in London. You know, the kind of chance encounter that makes you say, "Small world!" Milgram noticed that these occurrences happened more often than he felt they should and set up a study to discern the average number of people through which two completely unconnected people are linked. He asked people in two randomly selected towns in the Midwest to get letters to people on the East Coast who they did not know. To get them there, they were instructed to send their letters to someone who they thought would be closer than they were. The average number of links was 6, which gives rise to the 6 degrees of separation thing with actors and the 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon game (I'm only three degrees from him, btw). Milgram noted that most people have a lot of short-range, local connections and a few looking connections that span great distances. Graph theorists and neuroscientists began using the terminology when they noticed that other networks, including neurons, have the same structure. Buszaki (sp?) suggests that, while most neural connections are short and local, the brain can be spanned in just six long-range jumps, just like people. In terms of neurons, that structure prevents deleterious damage while also promoting efficient sharing of "information" (electrochemical potential).
I can look up citations if anyone wants them.
calicosculpin on December 27th, 2017 at 22:13 UTC »
what does 'small world' refer to? i read tfa but it's just the abstract.