Papers › Echoes through Time: Evolution of the Italian COVID-19 Vaccination Debate
Echoes through Time: Evolution of the Italian COVID-19 Vaccination Debate
Giuseppe Crupi, Yelena Mejova, Michele Tizzani, Daniela Paolotti, Andre Panisson
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
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 use a Twitter dataset spanning September 2019 - November 2021 to examine the state of polarization around vaccination. We propose a hierarchical clustering approach to find the largest communities in the endorsement networks of different time periods, and manually illustrate that it produces communities of users sharing a stance. Examining the structure of these networks, as well as textual content of their interactions, we find the stark division between supporters and hesitant individuals to continue throughout the vaccination campaign. However, we find an increasing commonality in the topical focus of the vaccine supporters and vaccine hesitant, pointing to a possible common set of facts the two sides may agree on. Still, we discover a series of concerns voiced by the hesitant community, ranging from unfounded conspiracies (microchips in vaccines) to public health policy discussion (vaccine passport limitations). We recommend an ongoing surveillance of this debate, especially to uncover concerns around vaccination before the public health decisions and official messaging are made public.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections