Long-term resilience of online battle over vaccines and beyond
Lucia Illari, Nicholas J. Restrepo, Neil F. Johnson

TL;DR
This study analyzes the persistent structure of online vaccine-related communities on Facebook, revealing resilience to interventions and proposing network-based strategies for opinion moderation.
Contribution
It provides a detailed mapping of online vaccine discourse networks and introduces a shift towards structural interventions for opinion change.
Findings
Network architecture remains stable despite interventions.
Communities blend multiple topics, creating redundant pathways.
Network engineering can moderate opinions without content removal.
Abstract
What has been the impact of the enormous amounts of time, effort and money spent promoting pro-vaccine science from pre-COVID-19 to now? We answer this using a unique mapping of online competition between pro- and anti-vaccination views among ~100M Facebook Page members, tracking 1,356 interconnected communities through platform interventions. Remarkably, the network's fundamental architecture shows no change: the isolation of established expertise and the symbiosis of anti and mainstream neutral communities persist. This means that even if the same time, effort and money continue to be spent, nothing will likely change. The reason for this resilience lies in "glocal" evolution: Communities blend multiple topics while bridging neighborhood-level to international scales, creating redundant pathways that transcend categorical targeting. The solution going forward is to focus on the…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsMisinformation and Its Impacts · Hate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection · Vaccine Coverage and Hesitancy
