Linguistic Fingerprints of Pro-vaccination and Anti-vaccination Writings

Abstract

Vaccination hesitancy has been gaining public attention as a global health threat. With the echo chamber effect of social media and the prevalence of misinformation, it is becoming more important to understand all aspects of anti-vaccination attitudes, especially when facts to the contrary can solidify rather than change beliefs. Starting with the question of what might drive anti- or pro-vaccination views, this paper describes a new, balanced corpus of vaccination writings. In order to gather all the linguistic signals, corpus analysis as well as feature selection and classification tasks are used to explore themes and motivations that define each class. Our results reveal that anti-vaccination writings are typically less formal. Results also indicate the possibility that the authors of such writings are processing trauma. These findings suggest that future health promotion efforts should make attempts not to talk down to individuals and should stem from a place of understanding.