How Anti-Vaxxers Manipulate Twitter To Spread Their Dangerous Message

At Wired , Renee Diresta and Gilad Lotan pose an interesting analysis of “ Anti - Vax Twitter , ” a small , cheap , and extremely coordinate group of antivaxxers using Twitter to maximize their impact on policy and public opinion .

To take a closer smell at how anti - vax Twitter organizes its attack , specifically against the California legislation , we study the hashtags used by people in the web . In web graphs like the one above , circular node are Twitter handles ; larger nodes indicate bill with more followers within the web , making their tweet more likely to be attend and acted upon . That ’s called “ high centrality . ” The lines between the nodes represent follower relationships . Different colors act communities of people who are sharing a like message , and the distance between regions is establish on common railroad tie — the closer a colored grouping is to another , the more shared connections its members have , and the more likely information is to spread amongst the groups .

It ’s no mystery that Twitter can be used to amplify a message ( an depth psychology of 2014 ’s cabal - fuel # cdcwhistleblower hashtag found 25 % of the 250,000 tweet label with the hashtag between August 18 and December 1 of 2014were trackable to “ 10 prominent anti - vax accounts ” ) . But Diresta and Lotan ’s investigating go beyond such canonic chirrup metric . More fascinating is what their psychoanalysis bring out about the relationships between ostensibly disparate Twitter communities , and how these relationships develop in reception to current event .

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For instance , when anti - vax tweeter changed naturally in response to political roadblock , “ a raw radical [ emerged ] in the space between ‘ Antivax Twitter ’ and ‘ Conservative Twitter ’ . ” Diresta and Lotan call this new radical “ vaccine choice ” Twitter . Notably , it shun conspiracy and crap scientific discipline in party favor of freedom - empty words :

The tweeters are the same individuals who have long been active in the autism - vaccinum # cdcwhistleblower mesh . And in the beginning , much of the subject shared in # sb277 [ the California State Assembly will soon vote onSB-277 , which would “ pass the exemption from existing specified immunization requirement based upon personal notion , but would allow granting immunity from future immunization requirement take for appropriate by the State Department of Public Health for either medical grounds or personal beliefs . ” ] focused on the same anti - vax pseudoscience underlie # cdcwhistleblower . However , as bad science and conspiracies repeatedly lost in legislative votes , anti - vaxxers updated their marketing : They are now “ pro - dependable vaccine ” parental right advocates . Instructions to the radical now concentrate on hammer home traditionally conservative “ paternal choice ” and “ health exemption ” message rather than twirp about autism and toxins .

“ wellness freedom , ” aka the right to subject your child and the children of others to such familiarity as the freedom measles and freedom pertussis . ‘ Murica .

Dji Drone