Exploring the latent social space of COVID-19 Twitter elites

Within the context of the COVID-19 Infodemic, popular social media users play a major role, as they have the ability to influence public opinion through their massive reach. We study the network of influential users discussing the pandemic on Twitter, where we consider users as nodes, and following relationships as directed edges. The resulting structure is modeled by embedding the actors in a latent social space where users closer to one another have a higher probability of forming edges, thus producing a ``social map'' of the COVID-19 Twitter universe. The results suggest the existence of two distinct communities, which can be interpreted as ``generally pro'' and ``generally against'' vaccine mandates. We further show that the two groups are not fully homogeneous: the latent space accurately captures the entire spectrum of beliefs between the two extremes, demonstrating how closely the users' personal opinions tend to be related to who they follow.