Be careful who you follow : the impact of the initial set of friends on COVID-19 vaccine tweets

doi:10.26106/2mx3-rw91

Be careful who you follow : the impact of the initial set of friends on COVID-19 vaccine tweets

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Be careful who you follow : the impact of the initial set of friends on COVID-19 vaccine tweets

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title:	Be careful who you follow : the impact of the initial set of friends on COVID-19 vaccine tweets
author:	Krysińska Izabela, Wójtowicz Tomi, Olejniuk Agata, Morzy Mikołaj, Piasecki Jan
data of creation :	2021
pages:	1-19
DOI:	10.26106/2mx3-rw91
notes:	Version of record (VoR) available under DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3472720.3483619; information about research data is available in the HuggingFace repository: https://huggingface.co/datasets/webimmunization/COVID-19-vaccine-attitude-tweets
language:	English
abstract in English:	Although Twitter is regarded as one of the most potent sources of vaccine-related disinformation, relatively little is known about how Twitter constructs timelines for individual users. In this work, we examine the composition of the Twitter timeline conditioned on the initial selection of friends. We illustrate our method by analyzing how the initial selection of friends impacts the number of pro- and anti-vaccination information present in the timeline. Our experiment clearly shows the disproportionate prevalence of anti-vaccination content seeping into Twitter timelines even for accounts initialized with explicitly pro-vaccination friends. We also discuss ethical considerations of using automated bots for research purses in a social network environment.
conference:	Workshop on open challenges in online social networks (OASIS'21); 2021-08-30; 2021-09-02; virtual event; Ireland; ; ; ; ;
affiliation:	Wydział Nauk o Zdrowiu : Instytut Pielęgniarstwa i Położnictwa
type:	working paper
subtype:	conference materials