July 26, 2024
A cure worse than the disease? The controversy on Twitter around a fake COVID-19 treatment from France
This paper combines network analysis and the text analysis of 1.2 million tweets to examine the Twitter controversy around Didier Raoult’s proposal of a new therapy against COVID-19. It finds that media events drove spikes in Twitter activity, while pro-Raoult networks connected French-speaking groups with Trump and Bolsonaro supporters and blended conspiracy narratives with critiques of liberal political economy.
Abstract
This paper analyzes both the network of actors and the network of the discourses mobilized in the controversy around Professor Didier Raoult and his Hydroxychloroquine-based therapeutic proposal against COVID-19. To confirm our hypothesis, we implement a sophisticated and innovative research method on a corpus of 1.2 million Tweets, which consists of applying a network analysis combined with a lexicometrics analysis. We show that the reaction peaks on Twitter were linked to important media events. Moreover, many groups clustered around the accounts of political figures and media outlets that received numerous mentions. Trump's and Bolsonaro's supporter groups also connected with the French-speaking pro-Raoult groups. The messages of the pro-Raoult combined anti-science conspiracy theories and a critique of the political economy of liberalism and its impasses.
To continue reading please visit: https://doi.org/10.12681/grsr.38490
This open access article was published in the Greek Review of Social Research on 26 July 2024.
Smyrnaios, N., Tsimpoukis, P., & Papaevangelou, C. (2024). A cure worse than the disease? The controversy on Twitter around a fake COVID-19 treatment from France . The Greek Review of Social Research, 163, 11–36. https://doi.org/10.12681/grsr.38490
Keywords: Controversy, Covid-19, Twitter, Discourse, Network Analysis, Iramuteq
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