Political Context of the European Vaccine Debate on Twitter
| Autor: | Paoletti, Giordano, Dall'Amico, Lorenzo, Kalimeri, Kyriaki, Lenti, Jacopo, Mejova, Yelena, Paolotti, Daniela, Starnini, Michele, Tizzani, Michele |
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| Rok vydání: | 2023 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Sci Rep 14, 4397 (2024) |
| Druh dokumentu: | Working Paper |
| DOI: | 10.1038/s41598-024-54863-7 |
| Popis: | At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, fears grew that making vaccination a political (instead of public health) issue may impact the efficacy of this life-saving intervention, spurring the spread of vaccine-hesitant content. In this study, we examine whether there is a relationship between the political interest of social media users and their exposure to vaccine-hesitant content on Twitter. We focus on 17 European countries using a multilingual, longitudinal dataset of tweets spanning the period before COVID, up to the vaccine roll-out. We find that, in most countries, users' endorsement of vaccine-hesitant content is the highest in the early months of the pandemic, around the time of greatest scientific uncertainty. Further, users who follow politicians from right-wing parties, and those associated with authoritarian or anti-EU stances are more likely to endorse vaccine-hesitant content, whereas those following left-wing politicians, more pro-EU or liberal parties, are less likely. Somewhat surprisingly, politicians did not play an outsized role in the vaccine debates of their countries, receiving a similar number of retweets as other similarly popular users. This systematic, multi-country, longitudinal investigation of the connection of politics with vaccine hesitancy has important implications for public health policy and communication. Comment: Published version in Sci Rep |
| Databáze: | arXiv |
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