Moral Narratives Around the Vaccination Debate on Facebook
Mariano Gast\'on Beir\'o, Jacopo D'Ignazi, Maria Florencia Prado,, Victoria Perez Bustos, Kyriaki Kalimeri

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.…
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Taxonomy
TopicsMisinformation and Its Impacts · Hate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection · Vaccine Coverage and Hesitancy
