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

Abstract

When the threat of COVID-19 became widely acknowledged, many hoped that this pandemic 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 pandemic. 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 pandemic 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 main 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.

The Influence of Social Media and Institutional Trust on Vaccine Hesitancy in France: Examining Direct and Mediating Processes

“…Also, the circulation of information on social media tends to be segmented; meaning that different users will come across different types of information [ 72 ]. In the case of vaccination in France, a recent study of the spread of vaccine critical contents on Twitter during the COVID-19 epidemic found that vaccine critical activists had a limited ability to reach a wide audience, despite their intense activity [ 53 ]. A similar study conducted before the epidemic found similar results, as well as that defenders of vaccines tend to be retweeted by a greater number of users and that mainstream media occupy an important share of discussions [ 48 ].…”

“…In France, several studies suggest that not only do people have little recourse to social media as a source of information [ 51 ], they also tend to be very distrustful of the information circulating on the Internet [ 52 ]. Finally, a recent study covering the first year and a half of the COVID-19 epidemic found substantial divergence between the dynamics of the circulation of vaccine-critical discourses on the French Twitter-space and the evolution of intentions to vaccinate against this disease in the French adult population [ 53 ].…”

Behavioural interventions to reduce vaccine hesitancy driven by misinformation on social media

“…Blanket bans can drive groups and activities underground —Broad social media bans of individuals or of specific content can paradoxically result in the spread of misinformation and can galvanise problematic echo chambers by driving discussion into private social media groups or closed forums. 90 91 Such closed environments are unlikely to include different viewpoints or corrective information, so misinformation is more likely to be reinforced. Rather than rely on outright bans, policy makers and content managers should explore methods that limit the spread and influence of misinformation.…”

Global Misinformation Spillovers in the Vaccination Debate Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Multilingual Twitter Study

“…Thus far, scientific studies of the debate around vaccination on OSM have focused on specific countries [ 17 , 18 , 20 , 21 ] or English-speaking users [ 19 ]. Nevertheless, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought the vaccination discourse to a global scale [ 22 ], creating a deluge of international news around the development and deployment of COVID-19 vaccines, including low-quality content and misinformation [ 23 ].…”

“…The COVID-19 pandemic has spurred increased attention to this topic. A recent examination of vaccine-critical actors on Francophone Twitter found that their place in discussions on vaccines has remained relatively constant during the pandemic compared with the mainstream media [ 20 ]. Furthermore, Crupi et al [ 18 ] studied the Italian Twitter during the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccinations, showing greater engagement across vaccine-supporting and hesitant communities in terms of mentions and similarity between the communities in the topics discussed.…”