Asymmetric participation of defenders and critics of vaccines to debates on French-speaking Twitter

Gargiulo, Floriana; Cafiero, Florian; Guille-Escuret, Paul; Seror, Valérie; Ward, Jeremy K.

doi:10.1038/s41598-020-62880-5

Cited by 26 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 48 publications

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“…The streaming collection consists of a random sample of tweets that contain any of the specific keywords promoting strong antivaccination sentiments. This is a common method used to collect Twitter data on vaccination hesitancy and other similar topics [35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42]. It is well understood by academics and is often used to provide useful insights about the chatter on the web about a particular topic in a specific period.…”

Section: Principal Findingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy on Social Media: Building a Public Twitter Data Set of Antivaccine Content, Vaccine Misinformation, and Conspiracies

Murić¹,

Wu²,

Ferrara³

2021

JMIR Public Health Surveill

256

147

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Background False claims about COVID-19 vaccines can undermine public trust in ongoing vaccination campaigns, posing a threat to global public health. Misinformation originating from various sources has been spreading on the web since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Antivaccine activists have also begun to use platforms such as Twitter to promote their views. To properly understand the phenomenon of vaccine hesitancy through the lens of social media, it is of great importance to gather the relevant data. Objective In this paper, we describe a data set of Twitter posts and Twitter accounts that publicly exhibit a strong antivaccine stance. The data set is made available to the research community via our AvaxTweets data set GitHub repository. We characterize the collected accounts in terms of prominent hashtags, shared news sources, and most likely political leaning. Methods We started the ongoing data collection on October 18, 2020, leveraging the Twitter streaming application programming interface (API) to follow a set of specific antivaccine-related keywords. Then, we collected the historical tweets of the set of accounts that engaged in spreading antivaccination narratives between October 2020 and December 2020, leveraging the Academic Track Twitter API. The political leaning of the accounts was estimated by measuring the political bias of the media outlets they shared. Results We gathered two curated Twitter data collections and made them publicly available: (1) a streaming keyword–centered data collection with more than 1.8 million tweets, and (2) a historical account–level data collection with more than 135 million tweets. The accounts engaged in the antivaccination narratives lean to the right (conservative) direction of the political spectrum. The vaccine hesitancy is fueled by misinformation originating from websites with already questionable credibility. Conclusions The vaccine-related misinformation on social media may exacerbate the levels of vaccine hesitancy, hampering progress toward vaccine-induced herd immunity, and could potentially increase the number of infections related to new COVID-19 variants. For these reasons, understanding vaccine hesitancy through the lens of social media is of paramount importance. Because data access is the first obstacle to attain this goal, we published a data set that can be used in studying antivaccine misinformation on social media and enable a better understanding of vaccine hesitancy.

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Section: Principal Findingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy on Social Media: Building a Public Twitter Data Set of Antivaccine Content, Vaccine Misinformation, and Conspiracies

Murić¹,

Wu²,

Ferrara³

2021

JMIR Public Health Surveill

256

147

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…There were 3% more negative posts than positive ones. In an analysis of French-language Twitter posts, Gargiulo et al noted greater activity of posters expressing anti-vaccination views than those with a positive attitude [ 24 ]. This was also observed in a study of the degree of polarization of the sentiment towards vaccination among Facebook users posting in English [ 50 ].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Analyses of vaccine-related content available on social media platforms have been conducted in the world. Those analyses are based on data extracted from social media platforms and examine vaccine hesitancy, acceptance, sentiment and administrative burden [ 24 , 25 , 26 , 27 , 28 ]. Study data acquisition from Facebook and Twitter commonly relies on automated IT solutions offering data collection, monitoring and analysis [ 29 , 30 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

HPV Vaccination: Polish-Language Facebook Discourse Analysis

Sobeczek

Gujski

Raciborski

2022

IJERPH

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Social media platforms are widely used for spreading vaccine-related information. The objectives of this paper are to characterize Polish-language human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination discourse on Facebook and to trace the possible influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on changes in the HPV vaccination debate. A quantitative and qualitative analysis was carried out based on data collected with a tool for internet monitoring and social media analysis. We found that the discourse about HPV vaccination bearing negative sentiment is centralized. There are leaders whose posts generate the bulk of anti-vaccine traffic and who possess relatively greater capability to influence recipients’ opinions. At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic vaccination debate intensified, but there is no unequivocal evidence to suggest that interest in the HPV vaccination topic changed.

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“…#moderna and #pfizer). As we noticed in a previous paper [9], the vaccine-critical galaxy has a marked capacity to capitalize on hashtag use in order to be easily retrieved in keyword searches. The large use of these hashtags by a community implies that a user looking for information on a particular vaccine, has a higher probability to reach contents from this community.…”

Section: The Hyper-graph Structure and Mesoscopic Shape Of The Debate...mentioning

confidence: 90%

Assessing the influence of French vaccine critics during the two first years of the COVID-19 pandemic

Faccin¹,

Gargiulo²,

Atlani-Duault³

et al. 2022

Preprint

Self Cite

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When the threat of COVID-19 became widely acknowledged, many hoped that this epidemic would squash "the anti-vaccine movement".However, when vaccines started arriving in rich countries at the end of 2020, it appeared that vaccine hesitancy might be an issue even in the context of this major epidemic. Does it mean that the mobilization of vaccine-critical activists on social media is one of the main causes of this reticence to vaccinate against COVID-19?In this paper, we wish to contribute to current work on vaccine hesitancy during the COVID-19 epidemic by looking at one of the many mechanisms which can cause reticence towards vaccines: the capacity of vaccine-critical activists to influence a wider public on social media. We analyze the evolution of debates over the COVID-19 vaccine on the FrenchTwittosphere, during two first years of the pandemic, with a particular attention to the spreading capacity of vaccine-critical websites. We address two main questions: 1) Did vaccine-critical contents gain ground during this period? 2) Who were the central actors in the diffusion of these contents? While debates over vaccines experienced a tremendous surge during this period, the share of vaccine-critical contents in these debates remains stable except for a limited number of short periods associated with specific events. Secondly, analyzing the community structure of the re-tweets hyper-graph, we reconstruct the mesoscale structure of the information flows, identifying and characterizing the major communities of users. We analyze their role in the information ecosystem: the largest right-wing community has a typical echo-chamber behavior collecting all the vaccine-critical tweets from outside and recirculating it inside the community. The smaller left-wing community is less permeable to vaccine-critical contents but, has a large capacity to spread it once adopted.

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Asymmetric participation of defenders and critics of vaccines to debates on French-speaking Twitter

Cited by 26 publications

References 48 publications

COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy on Social Media: Building a Public Twitter Data Set of Antivaccine Content, Vaccine Misinformation, and Conspiracies

COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy on Social Media: Building a Public Twitter Data Set of Antivaccine Content, Vaccine Misinformation, and Conspiracies

HPV Vaccination: Polish-Language Facebook Discourse Analysis

Assessing the influence of French vaccine critics during the two first years of the COVID-19 pandemic

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