Falling into the Echo Chamber: The Italian Vaccination Debate on Twitter
Open accessAbstract
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.
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Previous work has shown that there is evidence of echo chambers on real social media platforms around information on vaccines in general.
“Previous work has shown that there is evidence of echo chambers on real social media platforms around information on vaccines, in general 54,55 .”
From Measuring the impact of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation on vaccination intent in the UK and USA (2021) · cites this paper as [55]
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Self-citation
- Authors
- Cossard, A., De Francisci Morales, G., Kalimeri, K., Mejova, Y., Paolotti, D., & Starnini, M.
- Affiliations
- Institute for Scientific Interchange (IT)
- Venue
- Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media
- Published
- 2020-05-26
- Volume
- 14
- Pages
- 130-140
- ISSN
- 2162-3449 (ISSN-L)
- 2334-0770
- OpenAlex
- W3012967881
- Cited by
- 126
- References
- 44
- Citations by year
- 2026: 6 · 2025: 8 · 2024: 18 · 2023: 20 · 2022: 41 · 2021: 26 · 2020: 6
- FWCI
- 49.35
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- diamond
- doi.org
- Locations
- Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- Fondazione CRT
- Institute for Scientific Interchange
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Misinformation and Its Impacts
- Physical Sciences › Physics and Astronomy › Statistical and Nonlinear Physics › Complex Network Analysis Techniques
- Social Sciences › Health › Vaccine Coverage and Hesitancy
- Keywords
- vaccination debate, measles outbreak, echo chambers, Twitter, vaccine hesitancy, online communities, network structure, content-based classification, Italy
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