Arnaldo Santoro, Alessandro Galeazzi, Teresa Scantamburlo, Andrea Baronchelli, Walter Quattrociocchi, Fabiana Zollo
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引用次数: 2
Abstract
Abstract The issue of vaccine hesitancy has posed a significant challenge during the Covid-19 pandemic, as it increases the risk of undermining public health interventions aimed at mitigating the spread of the virus. While the swift development of vaccines represents a remarkable scientific achievement, it has also contributed to skepticism and apprehension among some populations. Against this backdrop, the suspension of the AstraZeneca vaccine by the European Medicines Agency further exacerbated an already contentious debate around vaccine safety. This paper examines the Twitter discourse surrounding Covid-19 vaccines, focusing on the temporal and geographical dimensions of the discussion. Using over a year’s worth of data, we study the public debate in five countries (Germany, France, UK, Italy, and the USA), revealing differences in the interaction structure and in the production volume of questionable and reliable sources. Topic modeling highlights variations in the perspectives of reliable and questionable sources, but some similarities across nations. Also, we quantify the effect of vaccine announcement and suspension, finding that only the former had a significant impact in all countries. Finally, we analyze the evolution of the communities in the interaction network, revealing a relatively stable scenario with a few considerable shifts between communities with different levels of reliability. Our results suggest that major external events can be associated with changes in the online debate in terms of content production and interaction patterns. However, despite the AZ suspension, we do not observe any noticeable changes in the production and consumption of misinformation related to Covid-19 vaccines.
期刊介绍：
Social Network Analysis and Mining (SNAM) is a multidisciplinary journal serving researchers and practitioners in academia and industry. It is the main venue for a wide range of researchers and readers from computer science, network science, social sciences, mathematical sciences, medical and biological sciences, financial, management and political sciences. We solicit experimental and theoretical work on social network analysis and mining using a wide range of techniques from social sciences, mathematics, statistics, physics, network science and computer science. The main areas covered by SNAM include: (1) data mining advances on the discovery and analysis of communities, personalization for solitary activities (e.g. search) and social activities (e.g. discovery of potential friends), the analysis of user behavior in open forums (e.g. conventional sites, blogs and forums) and in commercial platforms (e.g. e-auctions), and the associated security and privacy-preservation challenges; (2) social network modeling, construction of scalable and customizable social network infrastructure, identification and discovery of complex, dynamics, growth, and evolution patterns using machine learning and data mining approaches or multi-agent based simulation; (3) social network analysis and mining for open source intelligence and homeland security. Papers should elaborate on data mining and machine learning or related methods, issues associated to data preparation and pattern interpretation, both for conventional data (usage logs, query logs, document collections) and for multimedia data (pictures and their annotations, multi-channel usage data). Topics include but are not limited to: Applications of social network in business engineering, scientific and medical domains, homeland security, terrorism and criminology, fraud detection, public sector, politics, and case studies.
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