Polarization of the Vaccination Debate on Facebook
Ana Lucia Schmidt, Fabiana Zollo, Antonio Scala, Cornelia Betsch,, Walter Quattrociocchi

TL;DR
This study analyzes Facebook data over seven years to demonstrate that vaccine-related content consumption is highly polarized, with echo chambers reinforcing existing beliefs and limiting the impact of factual information campaigns.
Contribution
It provides a large-scale quantitative analysis showing the emergence and growth of polarization and echo chambers in vaccine discussions on Facebook.
Findings
Content consumption is dominated by echo chambers.
Polarization increased over the seven-year period.
Users tend to consume only pro- or anti-vaccine information.
Abstract
Vaccine hesitancy has been recognized as a major global health threat. Having access to any type of information in social media has been suggested as a potential powerful influence factor to hesitancy. Recent studies in other fields than vaccination show that access to a wide amount of content through the Internet without intermediaries resolved into major segregation of the users in polarized groups. Users select the information adhering to theirs system of beliefs and tend to ignore dissenting information. In this paper we assess whether there is polarization in Social Media use in the field of vaccination. We perform a thorough quantitative analysis on Facebook analyzing 2.6M users interacting with 298.018 posts over a time span of seven years and 5 months. We used community detection algorithms to automatically detect the emergent communities from the users activity and to quantify…
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