Impact of the Covid 19 outbreaks on the italian twitter vaccination debat: a network based analysis

TL;DR

This study analyzes Italian Twitter data from 2019 to 2022 to understand how COVID-19 vaccine debates evolved, focusing on community polarization and key opinion leaders during the pandemic.

Contribution

It introduces a new dataset and network analysis methodology to track community polarization and influential actors in vaccine-related discussions over time.

Findings

Identification of polarization trends between NoVax and ProVax communities

Detection of key moments influencing public opinion

Characterization of user behavior within vaccine debate communities

Abstract

Vaccine hesitancy, or the reluctance to be vaccinated, is a phenomenon that has recently become particularly significant, in conjunction with the vaccination campaign against COVID-19. During the lockdown period, necessary to control the spread of the virus, social networks have played an important role in the Italian debate on vaccination, generally representing the easiest and safest way to exchange opinions and maintain some form of sociability. Among social network platforms, Twitter has assumed a strategic role in driving the public opinion, creating compact groups of users sharing similar views towards the utility, uselessness or even dangerousness of vaccines. In this paper, we present a new, publicly available, dataset of Italian tweets, TwitterVax, collected in the period January 2019--May 2022. Considering monthly data, gathered into forty one retweet networks -- where nodes identify users and edges are present between users who have retweeted each other -- we performed community detection within the networks, analyzing their evolution and polarization with respect to NoVax and ProVax users through time. This allowed us to clearly discover debate trends as well as identify potential key moments and actors in opinion flows, characterizing the main features and tweeting behavior of the two communities.