Facebook’s Vaccine Opponent Wins’Battle for Mind and Spirit ‘, New Map Show | Science

The first analysis of over 1300 Facebook pages with nearly 100 million followers created a network map that surprised public health professionals. Research shows that anti-vaccine pages have fewer followers than pre-vaccine pages, but have more, faster growth, and more connections to undecided pages. If the current trends continue, researchers predict. The anti-vaccine view will dominate online debate within 10 years. In this era, future vaccines against COVID-19 may be important to public health.

“The deficit is winning,” said Anthropologist Heijlerson. This paper leads the Vaccine Trust project at the London Hygiene and Tropical College, using the colors of the Anti-Vaccine Facebook page on the new paper map. “They cover less land with more land.”

The online page was “a heart-to-heart battle, there was no map of that battlefield at the system level,” said George Washington University data scientist lead author Neil Johnson. Previously mapped hate group online behavior And Islamic State Group. “We decided to take a look at it, and we were shocked.”

For their research, Johnson and his colleagues first identified Facebook pages as either pre-vaccine or anti-vaccine based on their content. They also identified pages that were involved but not yet decided by content or by the fact that the page’s administrator “liked” or “liked” the pre-vaccine or anti-vaccine page. They found 124 pages of pre-vaccines such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, bringing the total number of followers to 6.9 million. They found 317 anti-vaccine pages like RAGE Against the Vaccines, with a total of 4.2 million followers. We also identified 885 pages of KY’s breastfeeding moms, etc., and had 74.1 million followers.

The researchers then counted the links to each page and other vaccine discussion pages, and to those pages and even more. This is a method called snowball sampling. The software program transforms the data into a map, the pages are represented as circular nodes, sized proportional to the number of followers and represented as red (anti-vaccine), blue (pro-vaccine) or green (undecided) .. Highly connected nodes occupy more central locations on the map.

The map shows many central red nodes that interact strongly with many greens. Fewer blue nodes interact with green in the peripheral nexus removed from the central “battlefield”, as researchers call it in this week’s issue. Nature.. Analysis revealed that the vaccination prevention page is relevant both locally and globally, whereas the pre-vaccination page is predominantly global or national.

In percentage terms, the number of followers on red pages increased significantly over blue pages during the February-October 2019 study period. This is consistent with the outbreak of measles worldwide. Red pages are also more relevant and influential than blue pages. (Since then, the number of followers on every page has grown to millions.)

“The blues are fighting in the wrong places, one side away, and the main activity is centered around Red, which is completely intertwined with this entire green community,” Johnson said. ..

The blue and red pages have different followers’ involvement, says Larson, who did not participate in the survey. Immunization groups communicate information on one subject with one goal. In contrast, the study found that the anti-vaccine group consisted of multiple smaller groups discussing various health and safety topics. By doing so, they become more sensitive to diverse concerns and feel that undecided people are being listened to, Larson says. “It seems to us as a public health community that we have an old IBM model, not a startup Silicon Valley approach …. Red dropped it.”

“The vaccine room page” looks like it’s in the living room and their sermons don’t seem to be ahead of the choir, “said Bruce Gellin, global vaccination president of the Sabin Vaccine Institute. States.

Sinan Aral, an econometricist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, maps the false information spread online and praises the scale of the analysis. But he advises “skeptical eyes”. He says it’s not clear that the green-page and red-page links are convincing, or that online interactions cause changes in actual vaccination. He added that the predicted online dominance of the Red Group over the next 10 years “is much inferred from limited data.”

This research looks only at the way people’s perspectives circulate, not on the content of the page, “it just looks like they’re being manipulated, with no reason for perspective,” said the medical scientist. She calls paper battlefield rhetoric “awkward” and argues that it betrays the very idea that alters the skepticism of vaccines-the enemy of vaccine resisters. ..

But Johnson supports his terminology. He admits Maps is the first incomplete attempt, but states, “Because we look at the system level, the main results of our research are solid.”