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

TL;DR

This study examines how vaccine-critical activists influenced COVID-19 vaccine debates on French social media during the first two years of the pandemic, revealing stable proportions of vaccine-critical content and identifying key community roles.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of the evolution and community structure of vaccine-critical content spread on social media during COVID-19 in France, highlighting the influence of specific political communities.

Findings

Vaccine-critical content remained stable over time with brief surges.

Major communities exhibit echo-chamber and content amplification behaviors.

Right-wing community recirculates vaccine-critical tweets extensively.

Abstract

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 French Twittosphere, 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.