Falling into the Echo Chamber: The Italian Vaccination Debate on Twitter

Abstract

The reappearance of measles in the US and Europe, a disease considered eliminated in early 2000s, has been accompanied by a growing debate on the merits of vaccination on social media. In this study we examine the extent to which the vaccination debate on Twitter is conductive to potential outreach to the vaccination hesitant. We focus on Italy, one of the countries most affected by the latest measles outbreaks. We discover that the vaccination skeptics, as well as the advocates, reside in their own distinct “echo chambers”. The structure of these communities differs as well, with skeptics arranged in a tightly connected cluster, and advocates organizing themselves around few authoritative hubs. At the center of these echo chambers we find the ardent supporters, for which we build highly accurate network- and content-based classifiers (attaining 95% cross-validated accuracy). Insights of this study provide several avenues for potential future interventions, including network-guided targeting, accounting for the political context, and monitoring of alternative sources of information.

VaccinEU: COVID-19 Vaccine Conversations on Twitter in French, German and Italian

“…Specifically to the Italian context, Righetti (2020) and Cossard et al (2020) analyzed the debate on Twitter around the 2017 mandatory child vaccination law, observing the spread of problematic information and highlighting the presence of echo chamber effects (Cinelli et al 2021). Gargiulo et al (2020) obtained similar results when analyzing French data, finding that defenders and critics of vaccines focus on different topics, and that, while there are more defenders, critics are more active and coordinated.…”

Analysis of the Influence of Political Polarization in the Vaccination Stance: The Brazilian COVID-19 Scenario

“…Studies reveal that while Anti-vaxxers will not change their view under any argument, the pro-vaccine groups have been reactive and reticent due to legitimate questions (Burki 2020). According to (Cossard et al 2020), vaccination skeptics and advocates reside in their own distinct "echo chamber", but their network information structure is distinct. Insights in the Our study differs from related work by examining the political influence on pro/anti-vaccination stances in the Brazilian COVID scenario.…”

“…Studies indicate that anti-vaccination attitudes are more related to conspiratorial thinking rather than political bias or religious beliefs (Hornsey, Harris, and Fielding 2018;Bryden et al 2019;Cossard et al 2020). In this context, SARS-CoV-2 vaccines have been the target of all sorts of fake news and misinformation (Catalan-Matamoros and Elías 2020).…”

Perspective-Taking to Reduce Affective Polarization on Social Media

“…There have been several analyses of political homophily on digital platforms, especially on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, where politically-active users generally tend to connect with and consume content from sources that align with their political views (Bakshy, Messing, and Adamic 2015;Conover et al 2011;Cossard et al 2020;Garimella et al 2021;Cinelli et al 2021). There is also evidence suggesting these trends, at least on Twitter, are intensifying over time (Garimella and Weber 2017).…”