Long-term resilience of online battle over vaccines and beyond

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 system's network. We show how network engineering approaches can achieve opinion moderation without content removal, representing a paradigm shift from suppression towards structural interventions.