This repository contains the shared data associated with the paper "Political Context of the European Vaccine Debate on Twitter" published in Scientific Reports.
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 study, we examine whether there is a relationship between the political interest of social media users and their exposure to vaccine-hesitant content on Twitter. We focus on 17 European countries using a multilingual, longitudinal dataset of tweets spanning the period before COVID, up to the vaccine roll-out. We find that, in most countries, users' endorsement of vaccine-hesitant content is the highest in the early months of the pandemic, around the time of greatest scientific uncertainty. Further, users who follow politicians from right-wing parties, and those associated with authoritarian or anti-EU stances are more likely to endorse vaccine-hesitant content, whereas those following left-wing politicians, more pro-EU or liberal parties, are less likely. Somewhat surprisingly, politicians did not play an outsized role in the vaccine debates of their countries, receiving a similar number of retweets as other similarly popular users. This systematic, multi-country, longitudinal investigation of the connection of politics with vaccine hesitancy has important implications for public health policy and communication.
Read the full paper here.
If you use data or findings from this paper, please cite it using the following BibTeX entry:
@article{paoletti2024political,
title={Political Context of the European Vaccine Debate on Twitter},
author={Paoletti, Giordano and Dall’Amico, Lorenzo and Kalimeri, Kyriaki and Lenti, Jacopo and Mejova, Yelena and Paolotti, Daniela and Starnini, Michele and Tizzani, Michele},
journal={Scientific Reports},
volume={14},
number={1},
pages={4397},
year={2024},
publisher={Nature Publishing Group UK London}
}- Vaccine_Multilingual_Queries.tsv -> complete list of keywords used used to collect the data
- annotated_tweets.csv -> manually labelled tweets of the vaccine debate
- Politicians_list.tsv -> List of Politicians with their party affiliation and their twitter account id and screen_name
- Parties_OLS_coefficient.csv -> Regression coefficients for parties across periods