| Abstract |
The anti-vaccination movement, despite the belief of many, is not something new but follows a parallel course with vaccines. The new thing is the internet, the easy and broad use of which has helped to disseminate views and ideas. It was expected to be used to promote skepticism over vaccines. Like the rest of the world, there are websites and videos that propagate anti-vaccine theories in Greece. This study attempts to capture these theories on the Greek Internet in order to analyze the size, content, expressive means, design and the arguments used. The Google search engine and YouTube were used for this purpose. A total of 27 websites in Greek were searched for. 33% were paramedical sites, 45% informative, and the remaining 22% were personal blogs. Likewise, 33% of the pages contained original articles presenting the opinion of their authors while the remaining 67% reproduced articles and opinions from third parties. With 18.5%, MMR and influenza were the most commonly accused vaccines, followed by DTP with 11% and HepB 7.5%, while the highest percentage of pages (81.5%) expressed opinions against all vaccines without exception. 78% of the sites claim that vaccines contain dangerous ingredients. The most commonly mentioned are aluminum, thiomersal and the excipients in general. An 89% of videos claim that vaccines cause serious diseases or even death, 30% that they harm the immune system, etc. They also raised issues of trust regarding the authorities, doctors, and alternative treatments such as homeopathy and herbal medicine. Regarding website design, 85% contained links to anti-vaccination material while none of them had corresponding links to vaccine information pages, 11% used personal testimonies of victims or relatives in their articles and 59% translated expert opinions on the vaccines they claim. An 81.5% contained syringe images, 3.7% images of vaccine victims, and in 22% there was a separate section about vaccines. Users' comments were allowed at 70%, while disclaimer of the author existed at 26%. On YouTube, 26% were vaccine-promoting videos, 29% had anti-vaccination views on one or more vaccines, 17% were of informative content, 14% were other content, 13% were doubled, and 1% subtitled. Average anti-vaccine videos (AV)views were higher (median: 35) than videos that promoted vaccination (PV) (median: 52). The mean duration of PVs was 8.18 min ± 6.05 (mean ± SD), while AV mean duration of 19.28 min ± 31.65, but not statistically significant (p = 0.09, Anova test). As for views, AV were more than PV, 5675views ± 7212 vs 1947views ± 4725, p = 0.005. The majority of PVs were informative, while AVs used fear more often as expressive means. Compared with foreign studies, the results have many similarities in terms of sites, while on YouTube there were some differences, especially in the average duration of videos. There are a lot of similarities of the present study with foreign studies in terms of content of articles, expressive means and the structure of the web pages, while the differences lies mainly in the technical features as the websites seems to look amateur. On YouTube, there were a lot of anti-vaccine videos, many of them were subtitled videos in English, and many of them presented extreme views rather hard to believe by the average user.
Continued monitoring for the online opinions for vaccines is considered necessary with future studies including social media.
|
Collections
