Unraveling the Anti-Vax Movement: Insights from Social Media and Legal Perspectives

Abstract

[Name] [Name] ENG 1301 24/10/2025 The Anti-Vaccination Movement: Annotated Bibliography Badar, Mahrukh. "Calling the Shots: Balancing Parental and Child Rights in the Age of Anti-Vax." Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, vol. 28, no. 1, 2021, pp. 325-348. Badar evaluates the global rise of the anti-vaccination movement from a legal perspective and the challenges faced by policy-makers in addressing the problem. The article shows the results of literature search on the role of the internet in increasing the opposition of vaccines by spreading pseudoscience and misinformation. High-income countries face the greatest health challenges related to anti-vaccination movements globally. The balance between the role of the government in improving community health and civil liberties pose a challenge for making vaccines compulsory to all children. The author shows that parental and children education on vaccination could provide a solution to increasing support for the anti-vaccination movement. The article sheds light on a critical issue of legal barriers to addressing the opposition to anti-vaccination. Providing quality health education to children and parents through schools would increase support for vaccination and related community health benefits. This source will be important in research on the anti-vaccination since it will demonstrate the legal perspective to the problem. DiRusso, Carlina, and Kathleen Stansberry. "Unvaxxed: A cultural study of the online anti-vaccination movement." Qualitative Health Research, vol. 32, no. 2, 2022, pp. 317-329. The authors of this study evaluate the communication process of anti-vaccination advocates using social media to engage their audience. They conduct a qualitative analysis of social media posts on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to determine how advocates process information and engage their audience. The authors find strong evidence that anti-vaccination advocates on social media use shared social constructs to reinforce belief systems on health concerns about vaccines. The article responds to a critical issue on anti-vaccination by demonstrating the approaches that advocates have used on social media to influence their audience. The authors demonstrate that shared cultural and belief systems have the potential to influence the audience of social media posts on important health issues such as concerns on vaccinations. This source will demonstrate how advocates in the anti-vaccination campaigns on social media have been successful and the potential approaches the scientific community can use to counter their influence. The article demonstrates how social media acts as a tool for misinformation on vaccinations and related health issues on the subject. Benoit, Staci L., and Rachel F. Mauldin. "The “anti-vax” movement: A quantitative report on vaccine beliefs and knowledge across social media." BMC public health, no. 21, no.1, 2021, pp. 2106. The authors evaluate the role of social media as a factor influencing the rise of the anti-vaccination movement by conducting a global study of a sample of 2515 people around the globe. The authors investigate the relationship between information on vaccines and social media among the participants. The results show that there is a significant...