Moral Narratives Around the Vaccination Debate on Facebook

TL;DR

This study analyzes over 500,000 Facebook posts to uncover moral narratives influencing vaccination debates, highlighting the roles of Liberty, Care, and Authority in shaping pro- and anti-vaccine sentiments.

Contribution

It introduces a novel framework combining Moral Foundations Theory with neural network classifiers to automatically analyze moral narratives in social media data.

Findings

Vaccine advocates emphasize Authority and Care values.

Vaccine skeptics focus on Liberty and individual rights.

Moral framing varies significantly between pro- and anti-vaccine groups.

Abstract

Vaccine hesitancy is a complex issue with psychological, cultural, and even societal factors entangled in the decision-making process. The narrative around this process is captured in our everyday interactions; social media data offer a direct and spontaneous view of peoples' argumentation. Here, we analysed more than 500,000 public posts and comments from Facebook Pages dedicated to the topic of vaccination to study the role of moral values and, in particular, the understudied role of the Liberty moral foundation from the actual user-generated text. We operationalise morality by employing the Moral Foundations Theory, while our proposed framework is based on recurrent neural network classifiers with a short memory and entity linking information. Our findings show that the principal moral narratives around the vaccination debate focus on the values of Liberty, Care, and Authority. Vaccine advocates urge compliance with the authorities as prosocial behaviour to protect society. On the other hand, vaccine sceptics mainly build their narrative around the value of Liberty, advocating for the right to choose freely whether to adhere or not to the vaccination. We contribute to the automatic understanding of vaccine hesitancy drivers emerging from user-generated text, providing concrete insights into the moral framing around vaccination decision-making. Especially in emergencies such as the Covid-19 pandemic, contrary to traditional surveys, these insights can be provided contemporary to the event, helping policymakers craft communication campaigns that adequately address the concerns of the hesitant population.