An early Web history of vaccine skeptical digital rhetorics

Vaccine hesitancy is a public health threat stoked by vaccine skeptical rhetorics that circulate via the Web. While there is a body of work that studies the digital rhetorical tactics of vaccine skeptics, most of this work focuses on the Web rhetorics of the “Web 2.0” era, leaving the “Web 1.0” era relatively understudied and, in turn, foreclosing opportunities to look back before moving forward in the current moment. In efforts to yield glimpses into the antecedents of digital culture that have shaped contemporary vaccine skeptical discourses, in this article, we draw on systematically sourced website “snapshots” of vaccine skeptical websites from the Web 1.0 era. Specifically, by tracing the manifestations of DIY ethos from those snapshots, our analysis offers insights regarding the specific digital rhetorics of vaccine skepticism endemic to the Web 1.0 period, but also some tropes, practices, and forms of vaccine suspicious discourse that remain durable today. We conclude by discussing the implications of the analysis to contemporary scholarship and practice.