@article{fdi:010086061,
  title = {{A}ssessing the influence of {F}rench vaccine critics during the two first years of the {COVID}-19 pandemic},
  author = {{F}accin, {M}auro and {G}argiulo, {F}. and {A}tlani {D}uault, {L}a{\¨e}titia and {W}ard, {J}. {K}.},
  editor = {},
  language = {{ENG}},
  abstract = {{W}hen the threat of {COVID}-19 became widely acknowledged, many hoped that this pandemic would squash "the anti-vaccine movement". {H}owever, when vaccines started arriving in rich countries at the end of 2020, it appeared that vaccine hesitancy might be an issue even in the context of this major pandemic. {D}oes it mean that the mobilization of vaccine-critical activists on social media is one of the main causes of this reticence to vaccinate against {COVID}-19? {I}n this paper, we wish to contribute to current work on vaccine hesitancy during the {COVID}-19 pandemic by looking at one of the many mechanisms which can cause reticence towards vaccines: the capacity of vaccine-critical activists to influence a wider public on social media. {W}e analyze the evolution of debates over the {COVID}-19 vaccine on the {F}rench {T}wittosphere, during two first years of the pandemic, with a particular attention to the spreading capacity of vaccine-critical websites. {W}e address two main questions: 1) {D}id vaccine-critical contents gain ground during this period? 2) {W}ho were the main actors in the diffusion of these contents? {W}hile debates over vaccines experienced a tremendous surge during this period, the share of vaccine-critical contents in these debates remains stable except for a limited number of short periods associated with specific events. {S}econdly, analyzing the community structure of the re-tweets hyper-graph, we reconstruct the mesoscale structure of the information flows, identifying and characterizing the major communities of users. {W}e analyze their role in the information ecosystem: the largest right-wing community has a typical echo-chamber behavior collecting all the vaccine-critical tweets from outside and recirculating it inside the community. {T}he smaller left-wing community is less permeable to vaccine-critical contents but, has a large capacity to spread it once adopted.},
  keywords = {{FRANCE}},
  booktitle = {},
  journal = {{PL}o{S} {O}ne},
  volume = {17},
  numero = {8},
  pages = {e0271157 [19 ]},
  ISSN = {1932-6203},
  year = {2022},
  DOI = {10.1371/journal.pone.0271157},
  URL = {https://www.documentation.ird.fr/hor/fdi:010086061},
}