Moral Narratives Around the Vaccination Discourse on the Facebook Platform

Vaccination hesitancy has been a threat to public health since a long time, and it is currently being fueled by the large spreading of misinformation in many social media. Attitudes against vaccination usually rise around fake news or conspiracy theories, but according to moral psychology they are shaped by individual moral preferences. The Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) explains individual variations in moral preferences using five dimensions (foundations): harm, fairness, loyalty, authority and purity, and it has been shown that these foundations underlie human judgements on politics, religion and social cooperation. In this work we assess the moral preferences expressed in the pro- and anti-vax discourses in a large dataset of Facebook comments. We show that significant differences exist in some moral dimensions between these two groups, and we suggest that these differences should be taken into account when designing vaccination campaigns