It has grown largely through the sharing of information on social media- through headlines when there isn’t time to read the actual article. The vocabulary in these headlines used by anti-vaxxers and their opponents have noteworthy similarities and differences, giving us some insight into what the debate is really about. The wordcloud below is made up of words used in articles posted on Facebook that discussed vaccines- each article was labeled whether or not it was of an "Anti-Vax" sentiment. Three lists were created, one for uniquely Anti-Vax words, one for uniquely Pro-Vax words, and one for words that appeared on both lists, creating three separate wordclouds with size of the word representing frequency.
Visualization by Mallory Lewis 🌻 The original dataset by Alec Helyar can be found here.