The Role of Multimodality in the Anti-Vaccination Rhetoric

In this manuscript, we aim at generating insights into the multimodal rhetoric that underlies attempts to initiate and mobilize for large-scale institutional disruption by purposefully challenging the shared stocks of knowledge that sustain the dominant institutions of modern societies. We focus on discourses that are motivated by ‘anti-establishment’ sentiments and prioritize institutional disruption over the creation of alternative visions. Empirically, we engage with the anti-vaccination discourse on social media. Adopting a multimodal analysis of anti-vaccination groups active on Facebook over ten years, we show how a set of frames – free choice, anti-capitalism, back to nature, and oppression and conspiracy – combines a variety of different identities, actor roles, and arguments in ways that enact multiple ‘truths’ simultaneously but create convergence over time. From these empirical findings, we reconstruct a set of mechanisms that utilize multimodal orchestrations to solidify discourses of radical de-institutionalization.