The narrative of the anti-vax campaign on Twitter

Antivaccine controversial debates have been occurring for almost a century. As the debate has moved onto social media, the issue has been amplified by the interplay between the visual and the verbal components: for anti-vaccine campaigners the use of Twitter means giving them voice and massively amplifying their message. Yet, precisely because social media advertisements and news work on the basis of an algorithm that brings people to see similar news to those they have read before, anti-vax campaigners tend to read and to always believe in the same type of news, be it fake (Tandoc/Lim/Ling 2017) or real. In other words, they cannot discern real and fake news (Balmas 2014), as they do not realize that scientific fake news is the result of a decontextualization of the medical sources. This paper, by drawing on CDA (Fairclough 2014) aims at analyzing fake news ideological dynamics and discourse strategies related to the anti-vax campaing to unveil cognitive, social and institutional constructs of misinformation and to create a possible linguistic framework for fake news detection across scientific genres and cultures. 9705 tweets (roughly 40,000 running words) will be analized on a corpus-based approach (Tognini-Bonelli 2000). The quantitative analysis will be carried out with WordSmith Tools (Scott 2012) and WMatrix (Rayson 2006) to detect the main aspects related to socio-semiotic, lexico-pragma and semantic features. Qualitative analysis will follow to reveal the ideological framework behind the #anti-vax narrative and its rhetoric. Data suggest that the #antivax narrative is negatively-oriented and negatively-constructed thrugh the way in which discourse is formulated. WordSmith Tools has revealed that Tweets are characterized there is a great frequency of Noun Verb and Adjectives pivoting around the discourse of vaccination and their negative effects or adverse reactions on children, the necessity of being informed parents and the need to use social media to stop Big Pharma and eventually sue these corporation and, if this is the case, also the Government. In addition, the semantic profile elaborated through WMatrix evidences the existence of a bias within the #anti-vax narrative: objectivity in science is not taken into consideration as it is implied the presence of conspiracies and financial interests which lead to chaos and disinformation. To conclude, the discourse of #antivax discourse on Twitter, constructed in an accessible way, seems to be founded on moral and scientific grounds, supported by visual metaphors amplifying the verbal component of the tweet.