When the Post-Truth Devil Hides in the Details: A Digital Ethnography of Virtual Anti-Vaccination Groups in Lithuania

Abstract

AbstractThe main aim of this article is to understand how anti-vaccination communities on social media platforms can shape and rationalise their perception of truth, by using a theoretical lens of post-truth studies, and what contextual features frame the formulation of vaccine-related truth statements in post-Soviet contexts. This article explores two of the largest anti-vaccination Facebook groups in Lithuania. An attempt is made to get closer to the participants’ worldview by gathering data using a digital ethnography inspired approach, and then analysing the data with text-based methods. Content analysis was used to find the main themes and to merge them with wider analytical categories, which allows the ongoing process in the wider theoretical context to be investigated. Afterwards, discourse analysis was performed because the overall course of the research called for re-evaluation of the topic and methods from multiple angles. During the research, four analytical categories were outlined: crisis of trust, competing with science, populism, and an anti-public discourse. The Lithuanian case reveals that the proliferation of these narratives often originates in and is affected by contextual realities. It is argued that they must be considered when analysing occurrences of communities founded on alternative epistemologies.