Human Values and Attitudes towards Vaccination in Social Media

MARIANO G. BEIRO; ALESSANDRO ROSINA; ALESSANDRA URBINATI; CIRO CATTUTO; KYRIAKI KALIMERI; ANDREA BONANOMI

San Francisco

Conferencia; WWW'19; 2019

ACM

Psychological, political, cultural, and even societal factors are en-tangled in the reasoning and decision-making process towardsvaccination, rendering vaccine hesitancy a complex issue. Here,administering a series of surveys via a Facebook-hosted application,we study the worldviews of people that "Liked" supportive or vac-cine resilient Facebook Pages. In particular, we assess differences inpolitical viewpoints, moral values, personality traits, and generalinterests, finding that those sceptical about vaccination, appear totrust less the government, are less agreeable, while they are empha-sising more on anti-authoritarian values. Exploring the differencesin moral narratives as expressed in the linguistic descriptions of theFacebook Pages, we see that pages that defend vaccines prioritisethe value of the family while the vaccine hesitancy pages are focus-ing on the value of freedom. Finally, creating embeddings based onthe health-related likes on Facebook Pages, we explore common,latent interests of vaccine-hesitant people, showing a strong prefer-ence for natural cures. This exploratory analysis aims at exploringthe potentials of a social media platform to act as a sensing tool,providing researchers and policymakers with insights drawn fromthe digital traces, that can help design communication campaignsthat build confidence, based on the values that also appeal to thesocio-moral criteria of people.