VaccinItaly: monitoring Italian conversations around vaccines on Twitter and Facebook

TL;DR

VaccinItaly is a monitoring project analyzing Italian vaccine-related conversations on Twitter and Facebook, revealing misinformation, content spread, and social media influence on vaccine uptake, with public data access and interactive tools.

Contribution

The project provides real-time data collection, analysis of misinformation, and geolocation of users, linking online discourse to vaccination rates in Italy.

Findings

Detection of harmful and misleading vaccine content

Correlation between social media activity and vaccine uptake

Identification of influential content and misinformation spread

Abstract

We present VaccinItaly, a project which monitors Italian online conversations around vaccines, on Twitter and Facebook. We describe the ongoing data collection, which follows the SARS-CoV-2 vaccination campaign roll-out in Italy and we provide public access to the data collected. We show results from a preliminary analysis of the spread of low- and high-credibility news shared alongside vaccine-related conversations on both social media platforms. We also investigate the content of most popular YouTube videos and encounter several cases of harmful and misleading content about vaccines. Finally, we geolocate Twitter users who discuss vaccines and correlate their activity with open data statistics on vaccine uptake. We make up-to-date results available to the public through an interactive online dashboard associated with the project. The goal of our project is to gain further understanding of the interplay between the public discourse on online social media and the dynamics of vaccine uptake in the real world.