The Web Conference 2023

Our work "Moral Narratives Around the Vaccination Debate on Facebook" is being presented at the 2023 ACM Web Conference!

After the recent COVID-19 pandemics, the return to normality was led by the development of several SARS-COV-2 vaccines and the massive vaccination of the population. However, we have seen large discussions in society regarding vaccine hesitancy: antivax groups used arguments as individual freedom, vaccines’ toxicity or secondary effects, or conflicting interests of pharmaceutical companies, in order to advocate against the vaccines. This situation put into risk the aim of herd immunity necessary for controlling the pandemics.

In this work we show how these attitudes against vaccination are driven by moral values. In order to do this, we use the framework provided by the Moral Foundation Theory, which identifies 6 foundations of morality: care –which is the concern for the suffering of others-, fairness –the concern about unfair treatment–, loyalty, authority, purity and liberty.

While previous works showed an association between vaccine hesitancy and moral values based on clinical trials, here we use social media data from Facebook to see how people center their arguments in favour or againts vaccination, and which moral narratives they use. We use a deep network to predict the moral values present in the users’ comments, and to classify these comments as pro- or anti-vax. Then, we see clear differences in the moral values expressed in pro- and anti-vax comments.

Understanding these differences can help health authorities to develop better communication campaigns that address the concerns and drivers of hesitancy of specific groups.

Link to the article: “Moral Narratives Around the Vaccination Debate on Facebook”

Link to the conference site: 2023 ACM Web Conference