Italian Debate on Measles Vaccination: How Twitter Data Highlight Communities and Polarity

Social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube had proven to be valuable sources of information. These platforms are a fruitful source of freely collectible public opinions. Due to the recent outbreak of the monkeypox disease, and in light of the historical pandemic that affected the whole world, we examine the issue of understanding the Italian opinion towards vaccinations of diseases that have apparently disappeared. To address this issue, we study the flow of information on the measles vaccine by looking at Twitter data. We discovered that vaccine skeptics have a higher tweeting activity, and the hashtags used by the three classes of users (pro-vaccine, anti-vaccine, and neutral) fall into three different communities, corresponding to the groups identified by opinion polarization towards the vaccine. By analyzing how hashtags are shared in different communities, we show that communication exists only in the neutral-opinion community.