Asymmetric participation of defenders and critics of vaccines to debates on French-speaking Twitter.

ABSTRACT: For more than a decade, doubt about vaccines has become an increasingly important global issue. Polarization of opinions on this matter, especially through social media, has been repeatedly observed, but details about the balance of forces are left unclear. In this paper, we analyse the flow of information on vaccines on the French-speaking realm of Twitter between 2016 and 2017. Two major asymmetries appear. Rather than opposing themselves on each vaccine, defenders and critics focus on different vaccines and vaccine-related topics. Pro-vaccine accounts focus on hopes for new groundbreaking vaccines and on ongoing outbreaks of vaccine-preventable illnesses. Vaccine critics concentrate their posts on a limited number of "controversial" vaccines and adjuvants. Furthermore, vaccine-critical

SUBMITTER: Gargiulo F 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7171088 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature