# Polarization of the Vaccination Debate on Facebook

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.02903 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.02903/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 9 Jan 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [A Survey on Echo Chambers on Social Media: Description, Detection and Mitigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05084/) (2021)
- [Characterizing Partisan Political Narrative Frameworks about COVID-19 on Twitter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06960/) (2021)
- [Learning Ideological Embeddings from Information Cascades](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13589/) (2021)
- [A Multilingual Dataset of COVID-19 Vaccination Attitudes on Twitter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.14619/) (2022)
- [Detecting Anti-Vaccine Users on Twitter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.11333/) (2021)
- [Can LLMs Assist Annotators in Identifying Morality Frames? -- Case Study on Vaccination Debate on Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.01991/) (2025)
- [Dynamics and triggers of misinformation on vaccines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12264/) (2022)
- [Demystifying the COVID-19 vaccine discourse on Twitter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.13523/) (2022)
- [Proposing a conceptual framework: social media listening for public health behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02037/) (2023)
- [All Polarized but Still Different: a Multi-factorial Metric to Discriminate between Polarization Behaviors on Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04603/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vaccine hesitancy has been recognized as a major global health threat. Having access to any type of information in social media has been suggested as a potential powerful influence factor to hesitancy. Recent studies in other fields than vaccination show that access to a wide amount of content through the Internet without intermediaries resolved into major segregation of the users in polarized groups. Users select the information adhering to theirs system of beliefs and tend to ignore dissenting information. In this paper we assess whether there is polarization in Social Media use in the field of vaccination. We perform a thorough quantitative analysis on Facebook analyzing 2.6M users interacting with 298.018 posts over a time span of seven years and 5 months. We used community detection algorithms to automatically detect the emergent communities from the users activity and to quantify the cohesiveness over time of the communities. Our findings show that content consumption about vaccines is dominated by the echo-chamber effect and that polarization increased over years. Communities emerge from the users consumption habits, i.e. the majority of users only consumes information in favor or against vaccines, not both. The existence of echo-chambers may explain why social-media campaigns providing accurate information may have limited reach, may be effective only in sub-groups and might even foment further polarization of opinions. The introduction of dissenting information into a sub-group is disregarded and can have a backfire effect, further reinforcing the existing opinions within the sub-group.