Related papers: Echoes through Time: Evolution of the Italian COVI…
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…
Vaccine hesitancy, or the reluctance to be vaccinated, is a phenomenon that has recently become particularly significant, in conjunction with the vaccination campaign against COVID-19. During the lockdown period, necessary to control the…
The kick-off of vaccination campaigns in Europe, starting in late December 2020, has been followed by the online spread of controversies and conspiracies surrounding vaccine validity and efficacy. We study Twitter discussions in three major…
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…
Societies worldwide have witnessed growing rifts separating advocates and opponents of vaccinations and other COVID-19 countermeasures. With the rollout of vaccination campaigns, German-speaking regions exhibited much lower vaccination…
Although multiple COVID-19 vaccines have been available for several months now, vaccine hesitancy continues to be at high levels in the United States. In part, the issue has also become politicized, especially since the presidential…
Vaccine hesitancy has been recognized as a major global health threat. Having access to any type of information in social media has been suggested as a potential powerful influence factor to hesitancy. Recent studies in other fields than…
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…
At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, fears grew that making vaccination a political (instead of public health) issue may impact the efficacy of this life-saving intervention, spurring the spread of vaccine-hesitant content. In this…
The COVID-19 pandemic is not only having a heavy impact on healthcare but also changing people's habits and the society we live in. Countries such as Italy have enforced a total lockdown lasting several months, with most of the population…
The Covid-19 pandemic has sparked renewed attention on the prevalence of misinformation online, whether intentional or not, underscoring the potential risks posed to individuals' quality of life associated with the dissemination of…
The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic reminded us how vaccination can be a divisive topic on which the public conversation is permeated by misleading claims, and thoughts tend to polarize, especially on online social networks. In this work, motivated by…
The COVID-19 pandemic brought upon a massive wave of disinformation, exacerbating polarization in the increasingly divided landscape of online discourse. In this context, popular social media users play a major role, as they have the…
Administering COVID-19 vaccines at a societal scale has been deemed as the most appropriate way to defend against the COVID-19 pandemic. This global vaccination drive naturally fueled a possibility of Pro-Vaxxers and Anti-Vaxxers strongly…
Background: Social media chatter in 2020 has been largely dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Existing research shows that COVID-19 discourse is highly politicized, with political preferences linked to beliefs and disbeliefs about the…
The debate around vaccines has been going on for decades, but the COVID-19 pandemic showed how crucial it is to understand and mitigate anti-vaccine sentiments. While the pandemic may be over, it is still important to understand how the…
COVID-19 pandemic has brought unprecedented challenges to the world, and vaccination has been a key strategy to combat the disease. Since Twitter is one of the most widely used public microblogging platforms, researchers have analysed…
Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccines have been an important topic in public discourse. The discussions around vaccines are polarized as some see them as an important measure to end the pandemic, and others are hesitant or find…
The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted on every human activity and, because of the urgency of finding the proper responses to such an unprecedented emergency, it generated a diffused societal debate. The online version of this discussion was…
Anti-vaccine sentiments have been well-known and reported throughout the history of viral outbreaks and vaccination programmes. The COVID-19 pandemic had fear and uncertainty about vaccines which has been well expressed on social media…