Impact of the COVID-19 Outbreak on the Italian Twitter Vaccination Debate: A Network-Based Analysis

This paper investigates the impact of the COVID-19 out-break on the Italian Twitter vaccination debate through a network-based analysis. By collecting over 9 million Italian-language tweets from January 2019 to May 2022, we constructed monthly retweet networks to study the evolution of user interactions and polarization. Our results show a dramatic increase in activity and network centralization after the pandemic onset, with the debate becoming more polarized and dominated by a few influential hubs. We identified and characterized core ProVax and NoVax communities, highlighting their differences in engagement, visibility, and influence. The publicly released TwitterVax dataset supports further research on vaccine-related discourse in social media.