VaccinEU: COVID-19 vaccine conversations on Twitter in French, German and Italian

VaccinItaly: monitoring Italian conversations around vaccines on Twitter and Facebook

We present VaccinItaly, a project which monitors Italian online conversations around vaccines, on Twitter and Facebook. We describe the ongoing data collection, which follows the SARS-CoV-2 vaccination campaign roll-out in Italy and we provide public access to the data collected. We show results from a preliminary analysis of the spread of low- and high-credibility news shared alongside vaccine-related conversations on both social media platforms. We also investigate the content of most popular YouTube videos and encounter several cases of harmful and misleading content about vaccines. Finally…

Cognitive networks identify the content of English and Italian popular posts about COVID-19 vaccines: Anticipation, logistics, conspiracy and loss of trust

Monitoring social discourse about COVID-19 vaccines is key to understanding how large populations perceive vaccination campaigns. We focus on 4765 unique popular tweets in English or Italian about COVID-19 vaccines between 12/2020 and 03/2021. One popular English tweet was liked up to 495,000 times, stressing how popular tweets affected cognitively massive populations. We investigate both text and multimedia in tweets, building a knowledge graph of syntactic/semantic associations in messages including visual features and indicating how online users framed social discourse mostly around the log…

Evidence of disorientation towards immunization on online social media after contrasting political communication on vaccines. Results from an analysis of Twitter data in Italy

Background. In Italy, in recent years, vaccination coverage for key immunizations as MMR has been declining to worryingly low levels. In 2017, the Italian Gov't expanded the number of mandatory immunizations introducing penalties to unvaccinated children's families. During the 2018 general elections campaign, immunization policy entered the political debate with the Gov't in charge blaming oppositions for fuelling vaccine scepticism. A new Gov't established in 2018 temporarily relaxed penalties. Objectives and Methods. Using a sentiment analysis on tweets posted in Italian during 2018, we aime…

Echoes through Time: Evolution of the Italian COVID-19 Vaccination Debate

Twitter is one of the most popular social media platforms in the country, but pre-pandemic vaccination debate has been shown to be polarized and siloed into echo chambers. It is thus imperative to understand the nature of this discourse, with a specific focus on the vaccination hesitant individuals, whose healthcare decisions may affect their communities and the country at large. In this study we ask, how has the Italian discussion around vaccination changed during the COVID-19 pandemic, and have the unprecedented events of 2020-2021 been able to break the echo chamber around this topic? We us…

新冠疫情暴发对意大利推特疫苗接种讨论的影响：一项基于网络的分析

Impact of the Covid 19 outbreaks on the italian twitter vaccination debat: a network based analysis

本研究构建了2019-2022年意大利语疫苗讨论推文数据集TwitterVax，通过41个月度转发网络的社区检测，分析了反疫苗与支持疫苗群体的演化极化特征，识别了舆论关键节点与讨论趋势。

Online information of vaccines: information quality is an ethical responsibility of search engines

The fact that internet companies may record our personal data and track our online behavior for commercial or political purpose has emphasized aspects related to online privacy. This has also led to the development of search engines that promise no tracking and privacy. Search engines also have a major role in spreading low-quality health information such as that of anti-vaccine websites. This study investigates the relationship between search engines' approach to privacy and the scientific quality of the information they return. We analyzed the first 30 webpages returned searching 'vaccines a…