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The Covid-19 pandemic intensified public discourse on social media, with Twitter becoming a key platform for information exchange. In such environments, authorities—influential figures from various domains—play a crucial role in shaping public opinion, having the power to influence offline behaviors both individually and collectively. In this work, we study the role of pro-vaccine and anti-vaccine authorities within the Italian Twitter debate on Covid-19 in five contextually relevant temporal windows corresponding to different pandemic phases. Analyzing a dataset of over \(\sim 50\) M tweets, we identify central actors and quantify both their impact and their influence on users’ opinions. Our results suggest that while anti-vax authorities were able to gain more consensus during the vaccination phases, pro-vax authorities became more influential in the latter stage of the vaccination campaign.

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Whose Voice Matters? Authority and Influence in the Italian Twitter Debates on Covid-19

  • 会议论文

  • 发表日期：

    2025年

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  • Veronica Mesina,
  • Andrea Failla,
  • Virginia Morini,
  • Giulio Rossetti

摘要

The Covid-19 pandemic intensified public discourse on social media, with Twitter becoming a key platform for information exchange. In such environments, authorities—influential figures from various domains—play a crucial role in shaping public opinion, having the power to influence offline behaviors both individually and collectively. In this work, we study the role of pro-vaccine and anti-vaccine authorities within the Italian Twitter debate on Covid-19 in five contextually relevant temporal windows corresponding to different pandemic phases. Analyzing a dataset of over \(\sim 50\) M tweets, we identify central actors and quantify both their impact and their influence on users’ opinions. Our results suggest that while anti-vax authorities were able to gain more consensus during the vaccination phases, pro-vax authorities became more influential in the latter stage of the vaccination campaign.