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.
翻译:当人们广泛认识到COVID-19的威胁时,许多人希望这一流行病将抑制“抗疫苗运动”的典型行为。 然而,当2020年底疫苗开始在富裕国家运抵时,即使在这一大规模流行病的背景下,疫苗犹豫不决似乎也是一个问题。 这是否意味着在社交媒体上动员疫苗批评性活跃分子是这种对COVID-19的疫苗犹豫不决的主要原因之一? 在本文中,我们希望通过观察能够导致对疫苗产生重复反应的许多机制之一,来帮助目前关于CVID-19流行病期间疫苗失常的工作。 然而,当疫苗批评性活跃分子在2020年底开始抵达富裕国家时,疫苗犹豫不决似乎就是一个问题。 我们分析在这场流行病的头两年里法国TWittldl球区关于COVID-19疫苗的辩论的演变情况,特别关注疫苗威胁性网站的传播能力。我们谈了两个主要问题:(1) 疫苗反应性物质一旦变小,但可以传播? 谁是传播这些物品的中央行为者? 在疫苗的辩论过程中,疫苗的最大作用是:疫苗界内部的大规模急剧上升,除了疫苗运动的一部分。