10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17609
In recent years, there has been a notable increase in the presence of techno-scientific issues within public discourse, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. This proliferation has been attributed to the pervasive attention economy, which drives actors in hybrid media ecosystems to seek attention-grabbing topics. Socio-technical issues, known to evoke strong emotions like outrage and rivalry, have become recurring themes in both news and social media discussions. However, the regulatory mechanisms of the attention economy often impede the full exploration of these controversies in the public sphere, as news cycles and audience attention accelerate due to the prioritization of engaging content on social media platforms. This trend towards attention-driven content has compelled news organizations to adapt their business models, resulting in an environment where citizens may rely on confirmation bias, ultimately leading to polarization of public opinion. Consequently, effectively addressing controversies in today’s public debate has become increasingly challenging. To understand the extent of influence exerted by junk news – a transient form of content that distracts rather than nourishes public discourse – we conducted a case study focused on the controversy surrounding the adverse and lethal side effects of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine during the vaccination campaign in Italy. Our analysis, based on a comprehensive dataset of 798,954 tweets and 31,169 news articles spanning a six-month period, reveals three interconnected information disorders. Firstly, the vaccine debate displayed a relatively stagnant progression punctuated by sporadic spikes of attention. Secondly, the peaks of the debate involved sensationalized coverage in journalism and amplified discussions on Twitter, primarily centred around suspected vaccine-related deaths. Lastly, reports of these deaths by legacy media accounts on Twitter correlated with an increasing ideological and partisan reaction from social media users over time, contributing to polarization. These findings shed light on how the junk news regime can impede the shaping of public debates, particularly on contentious socio-technical issues such as vaccination campaigns. The implications of this research extend to the broader understanding of public engagement with science and the challenges posed by attention-driven media ecosystems.&nbsp;
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The AstraZeneca affair. How the junk news regime affected the public debate on the COVID-19 vaccination controversy in Italy
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Guido Anselmi
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The AstraZeneca affair. How the junk news regime affected the public debate on the COVID-19 vaccination controversy in Italy
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T/S                                                                                                             ESSAY



The AstraZeneca affair. How the junk news regime affected the
public debate on the COVID-19 vaccination controversy in Italy

Federico Pilati                       Guido Anselmi
IULM University                       University of Catania



Corresponding authors                    Abstract
Federico Pilati                          In recent years, there has been a notable increase in the presence of
IULM University                          techno-scientific issues within public discourse, particularly during the
Via Carlo Bo, 1, 20143                   COVID-19 pandemic. This proliferation has been attributed to the pervasive
Milan, Italy                             attention economy, which drives actors in hybrid media ecosystems to seek
   federico.pilati@studenti.iulm.it      attention-grabbing topics. Socio-technical issues, known to evoke strong
                                         emotions like outrage and rivalry, have become recurring themes in both
Submitted: February 17, 2022             news and social media discussions. However, the regulatory mechanisms of
Accepted: May 11, 2023                   the attention economy often impede the full exploration of these contro-
                                         versies in the public sphere, as news cycles and audience attention acceler-
                                         ate due to the prioritization of engaging content on social media platforms.
                                         This trend towards attention-driven content has compelled news organi-
                                         zations to adapt their business models, resulting in an environment where
                                         citizens may rely on confirmation bias, ultimately leading to polarization
                                         of public opinion. Consequently, effectively addressing controversies in
                                         today’s public debate has become increasingly challenging. To understand
                                         the extent of influence exerted by junk news – a transient form of content
                                         that distracts rather than nourishes public discourse – we conducted a case
                                         study focused on the controversy surrounding the adverse and lethal side
                                         effects of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine during the vaccination cam-
                                         paign in Italy. Our analysis, based on a comprehensive dataset of 798,954
                                         tweets and 31,169 news articles spanning a six-month period, reveals three
                                         interconnected information disorders. Firstly, the vaccine debate displayed
                                         a relatively stagnant progression punctuated by sporadic spikes of atten-
                                         tion. Secondly, the peaks of the debate involved sensationalized coverage
                                         in journalism and amplified discussions on Twitter, primarily centred around
                                         suspected vaccine-related deaths. Lastly, reports of these deaths by lega-
                                         cy media accounts on Twitter correlated with an increasing ideological and
                                         partisan reaction from social media users over time, contributing to polar-
                                         ization. These findings shed light on how the junk news regime can impede
                                         the shaping of public debates, particularly on contentious socio-technical
                                         issues such as vaccination campaigns. The implications of this research ex-
                                         tend to the broader understanding of public engagement with science and
                                         the challenges posed by attention-driven media ecosystems.

                                         Keywords
                                         public debate; socio-technical controversies; junk news; vaccination cam-
                                         paigns; COVID-19; AstraZeneca; digital methods.




TECNOSCIENZA. Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies                    © The Author(s) 2023
14(1) pp. 105-122 ISSN 2038-3460                                                 Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
DOI: 10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17609                                                www.tecnoscienza.net
Pilati and Anselmi                                                                             106

1. Introduction

   Since the 2000s, and even more so during the COVID-19 pandemic, several studies have
pointed out an increasing proliferation of techno-scientific issues in public debate (Bucchi and
Mazzolini 2003; Marres 2007; Pulido et al. 2020; Fleerackers et al. 2022). According to the
perspective of the “attention economy” besides goods or services scarcity, also the attention of
individuals can be framed as a scarce resource (Simon 1971). In this context, attention is con-
sidered a valuable commodity, and businesses and organisations compete for it to promote their
products, services, or ideas. The journalism industry has been heavily impacted by the attention
economy. With so many different sources of information available to consumers, it can be dif-
ficult for traditional news organisations to capture and hold the attention of their audience.
   Indeed, influenced by the pervasive attention economy, the actors of hybrid media eco-
systems (Chadwick 2017) are constantly and relentlessly looking for topics that can attract
and retain attention (Venturini and Munk 2021). In this atmosphere, socio-technical issues
can promote high-activation feelings, such as outrage and rivalry, which are very effective in
capturing attention (Nguyen and Catalan-Matamoros 2020). As a result, controversies tend
to be recurring central themes both in the news and social media’s discussions.
   Nevertheless, the regulatory mechanisms of the attention economy simultaneously hinder
the public unfolding of these very same socio-technical controversies. Indeed, one of the main
lateral consequences of the attention economy is the acceleration of both news cycles and the
related audience’s attention towards topics and issues (Lorenz-Spreen et al. 2019). A further
perspective that informs the analysis of these phenomena is the “public arenas” model, as it
has been also recently mobilized in public communication of science literature (Neresini et
al. 2023; Neresini et al. 2019; Dudo 2015). According to Bosk and Hilgartner (1988), public
arenas arise when various stakeholders, including scientists, policymakers, interest groups,
and the public, engage in debate and struggle over the meaning and implications of scientific
findings. These stakeholders often hold divergent perspectives, interests, and values, and they
may have different levels of expertise and authority. Public arenas provide a platform for these
stakeholders to voice their concerns, challenge established norms and practices, and seek to
influence the policymaking process. Broadly speaking, public arenas can arise also across me-
dia ecosystems when a particular issue or controversy gains significant media attention and
generates widespread public debate and discussion. This may happen, for example, when a
news story or investigative report raises ethical or social concerns, or when a social movement
gains traction and captures the attention of the media and the public. The result has been
that many news organisations have shifted their focus towards creating content designed to
grab and hold the attention of readers or viewers, often at the expense of more in-depth or
investigative reporting. This trend towards attention-grabbing content has been fuelled in
part by the rise of social media platforms, which prioritise content that generates the most
engagement and sharing. As a result, a lot of news organisations have been forced to adapt
their business models to compete in this new attention-driven landscape.
   Against the current backdrop, it is worth noting that news circulating through media ecosys-
tems are not necessarily trustworthy or based on reliable sources (according to the prevailing sci-
entific demarcation criteria). Considering the increasing pluralization of information sources,
107                                                                        Tecnoscienza. 2023. 14(1)

especially online based, that may deliberately produce inaccurate or fraudulent news (Bory et
al. 2022; Crabu et al. 2023), it is relevant to ask what the returns are for the public. This acceler-
ation in the formation and dissolution of public arenas may force citizens to rely on confirma-
tion bias and, as a result, could create the basis for the polarisation of public opinion (Del Vicar-
io et al. 2017). Therefore, even if controversies are spreading more widely and more rapidly than
ever before, it seems increasingly difficult to address them effectively in today’s public debate.
   Drawing on these considerations, we seek to understand how and to which extent certain
regime of news, that can be labelled as junk news (Castaldo et al. 2022), may influence the
public debate concerning socio-technical controversies. Indeed, junk news are contents that
are built to fade away as quickly as they rose; as a results, they distract public debate rather than
nourishing it (Id). Junk news can be considered an example of information disorder, an um-
brella term that encompasses misinformation, disinformation and malinformation that affects
quality of news available across media ecologies (Wardle and Derakhshan 2017). To achieve
this aim, we selected a representative case study: the controversy that arose during the COV-
ID-19 vaccination campaign in Italy. The case in question is that of the adverse and lethal side
effects of the AstraZeneca vaccine that affected very few people worldwide (Liu et al. 2021).
   More precisely, our analysis seeks to highlight how the junk news regime could hamper the
shaping of public debates, especially when such debates concern controversial socio-technical
issues (e.g., vaccination campaigns). To achieve this objective, we collected 798,954 tweets and
31,169 news articles related to the adoption of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine in Italy
for a period of six months (1st January 2021 – 30th June 2021). Our analysis reveals three dif-
ferent but intertwined information disorders: first, the vaccine debate exhibited a flat progres-
sion with a few condensed spikes of attention (acceleration); second, the two main peaks of
the debate involved both journalistic coverage and Twitter discussions generated from news
and social media’s hypes of the suspected deaths related to AstraZeneca (sensationalisation);
finally, the reports of suspected deaths by legacy media accounts on Twitter correlated with an
increasing ideological and partisan reaction from social media users over time (polarisation).


2. The Italian context for vaccination campaign against COVID-19:
information disorder and connected processes
   The vaccination campaign against COVID-19 started in Italy in the last days of Decem-
ber 2020 and expanded to the whole national population from late February 2021. In early
March, some cases of possible strong adverse reactions to the vaccine patented by AstraZene-
ca were first reported. As a result, the government decided to stop the campaign (from 16th
– 19th March) and restarted it only after the Italian Drugs Agency certified the absence of
any link between the signalled deaths and the seized AstraZeneca vaccine batches. However, a
few weeks later (April 7th) the European Medicines Agency published a document that con-
firmed a weak correlation between rare thrombosis and AstraZeneca, suggesting the vaccine’s
use only for the part of the population older than 60 years. Following the EMA’s warning,
the Italian vaccination campaign resumed by prioritising the over-60s, but left unaffected the
possibility of using AstraZeneca, previously renamed Vaxzervria, also for younger citizens. In
Pilati and Anselmi                                                                               108

late spring, after participating in an open vaccination event, an 18-year-old girl died in Genoa
from a rare thrombosis linked to AstraZeneca. The day after this dramatic event, the admin-
istration of AstraZeneca vaccine stopped for anyone under 60 years old (June 11th).
   From an empirical viewpoint, the AstraZeneca a air can be identified as an exemplary case
to explore how controversies unfold in contemporary hybrid media ecosystems and how the
junk news regime could affect public debate concerning socio-technical issues.
   To study whether and how such junk news regime may have influenced the public debate
on the AstraZeneca vaccine, we have chosen to study three different processes related to in-
formation disorder that may arise from this regime. Indeed, information disorder refers to a
broad category of processes related to the circulation, consumption, and interpretation of
information in digital and online contexts. It encompasses a range of problems concerning
the effects of these processes on the quality of public debate (Wardle and Derakhshan 2017).
It is easy to recognize these features in the selected case study; the whole analysis takes into
consideration three processes connected to information disorder.
   The first process of information disorder that we want to analyse is that of the acceleration of
public debates (Castaldo et al. 2022). The junk news regime could indeed result in a constant
but scarcely followed day-to-day journalistic coverage, which, however, is disrupted by sudden
accelerations in both the production of news and the specular conversations on social media.
   A second process of information disorder we will investigate is the sensationalisation of
information and discussions. As argued by Bosk and Hilgartner (1988), the formation and
dissolution of public arenas exhibit a characteristic temporal pattern, whereby the dramatisa-
tion of events is essential to keep audiences’ attention on a given topic. Since different social
problems are constantly competing for attention, within the junk news regime a particular
issue may only emerge when it is over-dramatised.
   Finally, a last process of information disorder associated with the junk news regime is the polari-
sation of public opinion. By saturating online public debate with continuous bursts of sensation-
alist news and messages, the junk news regime leaves little time to discuss each of them (Venturini
2019). This dynamic creates the basis for the use of heuristic shortcuts and confirmation bias in the
discussion of an issue. Consequently, partisan or ideological positions are often used to maximise
newsworthiness or visibility, but these strategies may lead to the polarisation of public opinion.
   Starting from the above discussed processes driving to information disorder, in this article
we will map the AstraZeneca controversy using a digital methods approach (Marres 2015;
Bounegru et al. 2018) and subsequently we will discuss how its news cycle obstacle the forma-
tion of a stable public arena in which to properly discuss such a crucial socio-technical issue.


3. Research Design and operationalization of information disorder
processes
  To investigate the debate around AstraZeneca we decided to collect all the online news and
tweets in Italian referring to the vaccine for a period of six months (1st January 2021 – 30th
June 2021). Within the many social media, we decided to focus on Twitter for two different
reasons. First, Twitter had one of the most rapid and expansive growth in social media’s usage
109                                                                        Tecnoscienza. 2023. 14(1)

during the initial phase of the pandemic (+34% as for 2020 official report), mainly due to the
influx of new users seeking a digital arena where to discuss issues related to COVID-19. Sec-
ondly, we focused on Twitter because of its peculiar news-driven nature (Kwak et al. 2010).
   We utilised the Twitter v2 search API to obtain 798,954 Italian tweets containing the terms
“AstraZeneca”, “Astra Zeneca”, or “Vaxzevria”. Concurrently, we collected 31,169 news articles
from the repository “Explorer | Media Cloud” using the same keywords and language parame-
ters. This dataset includes the titles and URLs of news articles produced by 143 distinct Italian
journalistic websites, including newspaper, newscasts, radio, and natively digital blog. It is worth
noting that “Explorer | Media Cloud” includes all the major news websites in the country.
   To examine the progression of the AstraZeneca controversy, we first analysed the flow of
information overtime. We determined the temporal distribution of both tweets and news,
which enabled us to identify the peaks of attention refer to periods of heightened activity and
interest surrounding a particular topic or event (Boydstun et al. 2014). Researchers identify
important events or turning points in a given discourse or narrative and can provide insight
into how information spreads and evolves over time in different media channels (Id). To iden-
tify these peaks, we utilised a well-established formula and identified any time point with a
residual value greater than two times the standard deviation of its time series residuals as a
spike (Blázquez-García et al. 2021). In the case of news, a peak was identified as a distribution
of more than 300 news articles per day, while on Twitter peaks must exceed 25,000 tweets per
day. Based on this calculation, the peaks of attention were identified as occurring from 11th –
12th March, from 15th – 18th March, and from 10th – 11th June.
   To detect a possible process of sensationalisation we decided to circumscribe a sub-sample
of the Media Cloud dataset using some specific keywords (namely “morta/e/i/o”; English
translation: “death/s”). This allowed us to select 2332 news items. In this term, the general
claims that vaccination is equal to deadly risks produced a diverse set of news. These articles
range from the reports of suspected deaths (“Dead after vaccine, experts: Correlation between
dose and death”¹), to debunking pieces (“So does the AstraZeneca vaccine really cause fatal
thrombosis? For now, the answer to keep in mind is no. But, says the EMA, the possibility ex-
ists. ere s why”2), to pure click-baiting news (“Died after Astrazeneca vaccine, her life worth
      ”3). It should be said that actual deaths connected to vaccines were very few – roughly
in line with other typology of vaccines, such as the mRNA ones – and that this scientific
information was available at the time of the vaccination with AstraZeneca (Liu et al. 2021).
In other words, most articles reporting deaths linked to AstraZeneca did so in a communica-
tion context in which it was very clear, according to the available scientific evidence, that the
vaccine was safe enough. So, to our research goal, we can use the interest in (mostly spurious)
deaths as a marker (or proxy, in other words) for sensationalism.
   To test a possible correlation between Twitter attention spikes and the news subsamples
we calculated their Pearson coefficient4. In addition, we also performed a Granger causality
test5 to see if there is evidence of a statistical cause-to-effect direction between any of the three
considered distributions (i.e., tweets, total news, news about deaths).
   A last point of interest in our study concerns the potential polarisation of the public arena.
To operationalize this concept, we relied on the networked reaction of Twitter’s users as a
proxy for the polarisation of the debate. Due to the extensive nature of the conversation on
Pilati and Anselmi                                                                          110

Twitter, a comprehensive quali-quantitative mapping would have resulted in an overwhelm-
ing and unproductive outcome. Therefore, we opted to focus our analysis on the specific top-
ical moments related to the AstraZeneca a air, namely the peak weeks of March and June.
   To disentangle the communities of users involved in the AstraZeneca controversy we lev-
erage on retweet networks. This choice entails an assumption, namely that retweeting some-
thing means, most of the time, an endorsement of the original tweet. While some Twitter
users routinely state that “retweeting is not endorsement” there is substantial empirical evi-
dence of the contrary (Metaxas et al. 2015).
   Starting from this assumption, to get a rough measurement of ideological affinities within
the retweets networks we implemented a visual network analysis with Gephi (Bastian et al.
2009) using the output of its force-directed layout to intercept the emergence of homoge-
neous communities (Jacomy et al. 2014). A force vector layout works according to a physi-
cal analogy: nodes receive a repulsive force that pulls them apart, while edges act as springs
that bind the nodes they connect. In a network spatialized by forces spatial distance acquires
meaning. Indeed, two nodes are closer the more directly or indirectly connected they are. Spa-
tialization of forces can effectively re-materialize notions of graph mathematics. It was shown,
for example, that visual clustering in networks spatialized by forces is directly equivalent to
clustering with modularity algorithms. Centrality, betweenness, diameter, density, structural
separation, and many other concepts recover their graphical meaning. They cannot only be
calculated, but graphically visualised (Venturini, Jacomy and Jansen 2021).
   Finally, the 500 most shared tweets were selected and manually analysed to further triangu-
late the computational results with richer and deeper qualitative insights. While five hundred
tweets may seem a small sample it should be said that retweets are distributed in the discussion
following a typical power-law distribution. In our specific case the Gini index6 measuring
retweet concentration is 0.76 for the entire period – meaning that a few selected voices have
control over the framing of the debate on Twitter (Barberà and Rivero 2015) – and hence
legitimise the choice of a close reading of the top messages instead of using computational
techniques to model or classify all tweets.


4. Results

   By using news and tweets timestamps we depicted the general temporal trend, and we inter-
cepted either the pace and the possible accelerations in the production of journalistic pieces
or tweets. Assuming that Twitter discussions are eminently event-based, it was of paramount
importance to detect the peaks of attention and their relative position in both social and lega-
cy media trending curves. To ease interpretation, while accounting for the fact that social and
legacy media have different throughput capacities (i.e., the former is being measured in tens
of thousands of tweets while the second in hundreds of news), we have normalised volumes
in rank order to compare the time series on a common scale.
111                                                                        Tecnoscienza. 2023. 14(1)




                                               Figure 1.
                               Tweets (left axis) vs news (right axis)7.

   By comparing Twitter and Media Cloud time series it is possible to distinguish different
patterns on the attention paid to AstraZeneca vaccine. As shown in Figure 1 the debate on
AstraZeneca shows a fluctuating progression all over the six months we considered.
   A first relevant finding when comparing news and tweets is that legacy media coverage of
AstraZeneca is more evenly distributed than Twitter discussions. Indeed, on average, we can
count about 150 news articles per day (roughly 0.5% of the total) with a maximum coverage
of 901 items in a day (around 3% of the total). Conversely, on average 4,565 tweets per day
are published (again 0.5% of the total), but the day of highest activity contains 56,264 tweets
(14% of the total). These insights are also supported by the Gini index calculated on the con-
centration of news and tweets per day, that corresponds respectively to 0.52 and 0.81.
   In the light of these two initial findings, we can argue that in the case of Twitter it occurred
a flat progression interrupted by three rapid accelerations of the debate during the “peaks” of
attention. An equivalent acceleration, instead, is less visible for legacy media. However, also
in this case few events seem to attract a considerable part of the production effort concerning
news coverage of the AstraZeneca vaccine.
   Having assessed the different rhythms at which messages travel on news sites and Twit-
ter, we want to assess a possible sensationalisation of the controversy surrounding the debate
about vaccine safety.
Pilati and Anselmi                                                                           112




                                               Figure 2.
           News about AstraZeneca (left axis) vs. news about suspect deaths (right axis).

  Figure 2 compares press coverage for the totality of AstraZeneca news and for the subset
of news about the death links. In March and June peaks the stories about suspect deaths take
a central stage, appearing respectively in 15% and 20% of total headlines. On the contrary,
the smaller spikes in attention of April’s seems to be generated by a long tail of the diatribe
regarding the optimum age range in which to administer the vaccine. Indeed, between April
6th and 8th, it was firstly issued a rumour on the possibility of administering AstraZeneca only
to people over 60 years and then it was reported the official EMA communication about the
correlation between rare thrombosis and the vaccine.




                                              Figure 3.
                     Tweets (left axis) vs news about suspect deaths (right axis).
113                                                                           Tecnoscienza. 2023. 14(1)

   Figure 3 shows that in the context of Twitter, the attention toward AstraZeneca issues is
higher and more concentrated on periods in which journalistic outlets reported the stories of
suspect deaths. A specular interpretation is that news coverage about the deaths follows the
hype on this issue in Twitter. To find which one of the two hypotheses would have been more
accurate we perform a Granger causality test, but we did not find any evidence of a robust sta-
tistical cause-to-effect direction. Nevertheless, correlation is higher for Figure 3 (i.e., “tweets vs.
news reporting deaths” equal to 0.89) than for Figure 1 (i.e., “tweets vs. news” equal to 0.78).




                                               Figure 4.
                          11th – 19th March retweets network visualisation.

   A last point of interest for our analysis concerns the potential polarisation of the digital arena.
   By looking at the forced-directed network visualisation in Figure 4, it is possible to notice
how, during the first peak of March, the discussion on Twitter is divided into two distinguish-
able communities with a less dense bridge-area in the middle. Each node represents a user,
while an arch between two nodes, whose value is unitary, indicates a retweet of a specific tweet
by the user to whom the arc is directed. To visualise and analyse the data we used Gephi (Bas-
tian et al. 2009), an open-source software for the analysis and treatment of social networks.
The image reported was obtained using “Force Atlas 2” visualisation algorithm (Jacomy et al.
2014). The size of the labels is proportional to the number of retweets received.
   The first community is located on the left of Figure 4 and is composed of both a few newspa-
pers and politicians belonging to the Italian right-wing parties, as well as openly no-vax users.
Pilati and Anselmi                                                                                         114

   The second community, on the right, is instead composed of a multiplicity of different
types of accounts. The most retweeted users are major Italian newspapers and television
channels, the official pages of the Italian Police and of the Italian Drug Agency, and a wide
variety of opinion leaders consisting of physicians, scientists, and journalists.
   Finally, a last and smaller bridge group is located at the centre-right of the scheme. This
group is made up of legacy media pages. Its position suggests that they should have been
retweeted by users of both the two opposite graph areas.
   Digging deeper into more details, the discourse that can be traced through the analysis of
the most shared tweets confirms a polarisation not only at the structural network level, but
also with regard to content.
   Within Community #1, it is possible to trace two different discursive matrices. The first
and most evident is what we could define as a “no-vax” narrative, which is defined by an open
accusation against the “powers that be” (i.e., Italy, Europe or drug firms), who, aware of the
risks or damages, want people to be vaccinated anyway.

     The very harsh words of Mrs. Battaglia’s son: My mom was fine, she was healthy! Two days
     after the AstraZeneca vaccination she went into a coma from cerebral thrombosis. The state
     cannot use human beings to experiment with something like this.8

     The #AstraZeneca issue is simple: if the vaccine is safe and it’s a trade war against Britain for
     the EU, it’s a huge scandal. If the vaccine is not safe and the Swiss were right not to put it out
     there, it is an even bigger scandal for the EU.

  A second narrative within this community is carried out by right-wing politicians and is
based on an invective discourse against the Italian government considered guilty of having
made a mistake in the choice of vaccine administration to the point of causing deaths.

     #FratelliD’Italia calls for Health Minister Roberto Speranza to come immediately to Parlia-
     ment to report on the #AstraZeneca affair. Citizens demand and deserve transparency and
     clear information. We cannot afford to leave Italy in uncertainty.

  Regarding Community #2, as already suggested by the recognition of its users, the dis-
course is more jagged. First, there is a discourse led by newspapers, which after reporting the
suspect deaths continue to update this storyline.
  Other tweets concern the official announcements of the stop in the administration of
the AstraZeneca vaccine which are posted by institutional accounts such as the Ministry of
Health and the Italian Drugs Agency.

     Piedmont suspends AstraZeneca vaccine administration following the death of a teacher a
     few hours after the drug was inoculated #ANSA.

     All reservations with #AstraZeneca vaccines have been suspended with immediate effect until further
     notice from AIFA. For those who have already booked we will send an SMS to inform them about it.
115                                                                           Tecnoscienza. 2023. 14(1)

  Finally, the last and most prevalent discourse in terms of significance relates to the ways in
which sensationalist news are considered informational material to be debunked. On the one
hand, journalists, physicians, and scientists develop a set of rationalising arguments that show
how the risk of death linked to AstraZeneca is actually the same as that of many other com-
mon drugs. On the other hand, the same debunking strategy is carried out in a more ironic
way by common users that manage to get viral thanks to their sarcastic tweets.

      #fakenews A false statement from the Italian Medicines Agency @Aifa_official is circulating
      on the Net where it is communicated that multiple lots of #AstraZeneca vaccine against
      #COVID19 is banned. The #AIFA has denied it, the only batch is nr. ABV2856.

      Dear girls and boys, right now adults (the ones who run the world) are going crazy over
      0.00022% problematic #Astrazeneca vaccines, so when you ask yourself, why do I need to
      study maths? Remember it’s so I don’t become like them.




                                               Figure 5.
                           10th – 18th June retweets network visualisation.
Pilati and Anselmi                                                                                      116

   The discussion peak of June presents characteristics that are very similar to the March one.
It is indeed composed of two distinguished communities and a smaller bridge area in the
centre of the network.
   Looking more in detail at the composition of users, the enlarged Community #1 on the left
of Figure 5 is made up of politicians, journalists and newspapers that are linked to right-wing
and nationalist political parties, while at the same time we can recognize an increasing num-
ber of users retweeting to hoax sites, as ImolaOggi and Byoblu (Bory et al. 2022).
   The small bridge-area in the middle of the visualisation is instead composed of a multitude
of mainstream media (“ANSA”, “Corriere della Sera”, “Repubblica”, “LA7”, to name a few).
   Finally, on the right of Figure 5 the most prominent figures of Community #2 are physi-
cians and pundits already noted for their debunking campaigns, flanked by a separate set of
journalists and social media’s influencers.
   Part of this users that populate Community #2 react to the news of the suspicious death by
trying once more to debunk an excessive exaggeration of the link between AstraZeneca and
the thrombosis’ deaths using a caustic discourse:

     Fatal cases per 100,000 doses administered as of May 26: Pfizer 0.96 Moderna 1.99 Astra-
     Zeneca 0.79 Johnson 0.79. And irresponsible people fuel panic over AstraZeneca? From
     politicians I don’t expect anything, but from journalists I do.

     Venous thrombosis rate oral contraceptive pills: 5 to 12 women in 10,000. Thrombosis rate
     at atypical sites Astrazeneca vaccine: 1 person in 100,000. I expect you to at least stop asking
     women to take the pill because the condom “tightens”.

   At the same time, however, in the same community an opposite current of thought emerg-
es from the retweets of the talk show “Ottoemezzo” in which it was questioned the risks of
vaccinating kids, thus showing signs of an increasing fragmentation of views:

     #ottoemezzo #AstraZeneca @marcotravaglio: Why do we vaccinate kids? If Camilla had
     been German, she would still be alive. And it’s not just her. Commissioner Figliuolo must
     answer for this madness.

  On the opposite Community #1, the debate is instead led by a common rejection of the
way in which the vaccination campaign was settled and builds upon the same narrative al-
ready emerged in March. A first discourse is indeed based on the same accusation to “the
System”9, that deliberately experiments on people:

     Be sure to continue to be a megaphone for the vaccine business, preyed upon by Big Phar-
     ma, news outlets and various journalists! You don’t seem to care much about other people’s
     lives anyway!

     Dear young people, who have vaccinated so carefree and enthusiastically, urged on by the
     enslaved media and your favourite influencers, don’t you feel you are being taken for a ride?
117                                                                          Tecnoscienza. 2023. 14(1)

      Are you beginning to understand what kind of world you live in? This is truly a brutal test
      of maturity. #AstraZeneca

 In parallel, politicians and journalists insist again for the resignation of the Italian health
minister, guilty of messing with health citizens.

      Yet another spin on the #AstraZeneca vaccine, after being administered even to the very
      young during open days. Enough is enough, no more chaos and approximation. The govern-
      ment reports back to Parliament. We demand clarity: don’t mess with the health of citizens.

  Finally, a last and minoritarian discourse is perpetuated by some politicians and pundits
from the liberal right-wing area.

      While I defend the freedom to NOT vaccinate for those who do not want to, I inform my
      friends that this morning, according to the established rota for my age group, I received my
      first dose of vaccine (in my case, of #AstraZeneca). This seems to me to be the best method:
      everyone respects everyone.

   These users claim that the state should defend the freedom of taking or not the vaccine.
While this may appear to be a balanced or diplomatic approach, there are concerns that this
stance is potentially misleading. On one hand, acknowledging the right to choose whether to
vaccinate or not is an important aspect of individual freedom and autonomy. It is crucial that
individuals have the ability to make informed decisions about their own health and well-being,
based on their own values and beliefs. However, promoting vaccination while defending those
who choose not to get vaccinated may be seen as contradictory, as it implies a lack of commit-
ment or conviction in the value of vaccination. This may suggest an underlying propaganda
strategy, in which politicians are trying to keep together conspiratorial positions and truly
sceptical views using a seemingly balanced statement as a way to avoid taking a clear position.


5. Conclusions

   The controversy surrounding the AstraZeneca vaccine provided a valuable opportunity
to examine how the junk news regime impacts public debates on socio-technical issues. This
allowed us to explore how a specific cycle of junk news, affects and is affected by a far larger
number of actors and technical affordances than usually conceived. Our study revealed that
sensationalistic news peaks, fuelled by the junk news regime, cause disruption in the digital
arena of Twitter, resulting in the exhaustion of users’ attention and the exacerbation of the
pre-existing polarisation related to COVID-19 in Italy (Caliandro et al. 2020).
   Our study found that spikes in news and tweets were tightly connected, with legacy and
social media’s temporal dynamics influencing each other. This suggests that acceleration
and sensationalisation are two sides of the same coin, caused by the saturation of public
debate by the junk news regime (Castaldo et al. 2022). As a result of this regime, public at-
Pilati and Anselmi                                                                           118

tention shifts towards more emotionally extreme content, such as sensationalist news (Ven-
turini 2019). In the case of AstraZeneca, the attention towards the controversy depends on
its dramatisation, which in turn activates the confirmation biases already embedded in the
technical affordances that structure Twitter discussion.
   While significant progress has been made in analysing COVID-19 controversies, there is
still much to learn about the patterns of public debate surrounding this issue. A growing
body of research has focused on the role of the media and public communication in shaping
public perception and understanding of scientific issues. For instance, other studies already
investigated the relationship between the Italian media system and public understanding of
science. With this regard, Crabu et al. (2021) found that traditional news sources in Italy
tend to prioritise political considerations over scientific accuracy, which can impact public
understanding of scientific issues. Meanwhile, Campus and Saracino (2022) explored how
experts are transformed into celebrities in the media, and the impact of this form of science
communication on the public debate related to COVID-19.
   In this view, our research has shown how the Italian press has been found to prioritise re-
porting on suspicious deaths during the peaks of attention rather than providing an accurate
reconstruction of the various risks and benefits of AstraZeneca. This overemphasis on sen-
sationalised news related to suspicious deaths can be viewed through the lens of an increased
politicisation of the COVID-19 news coverage (Crabu et al. 2021). Furthermore, our study
also found evidence of the role of celebrity experts in shaping public opinion on COVID-19
in Italy. Twitter analysis showed that several physicians were acting as influencers in the com-
munities related to debunking COVID-19 misinformation. However, while engagement in
such polarised debates can increase the visibility of scientific communication, it can also in-
crease the risk of superficial forms of scientific communication, as highlighted in previous
studies of television talk shows (Campus and Saracino 2022).
   Although the Italian case could be a valuable starting point, more work needs to be done
to understand how these patterns vary across different countries and how different political
contexts can impact the public debates concerning COVID-19 controversies. As a matter of
fact, and as highlighted by other studies focused on COVID-19 communication crisis (Sacco
et al. 2021; Pilati et al. 2022), the results concerning the AstraZeneca affair may vary consid-
erably depending on the cultural, social, and political contexts.
   Furthermore, another possible avenue for improvement is to expand our analysis to incor-
porate a multimedia or cross-platform approach (Venturini et al. 2018). This approach would
involve mapping the same events across various mediums and platforms in order to determine
whether different communication environments yield similar results. For example, do tradition-
al news sources such as radio, television, and newspapers provide the same coverage as social me-
dia platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube? Additionally, can we track how influencers
and the public interact in different contexts, and what information they release and consume?
   By taking a comprehensive approach to analysing COVID-19 controversies, we can gain
a more nuanced understanding of how these debates play out in different contexts and use
this knowledge to inform future research and help mitigate the negative effects of the junk
news regime on public debates.
119                                                                                Tecnoscienza. 2023. 14(1)

Acknowledgements

  This research is part of the project “V-Data” (https://vdataresearch.com/) funded by Fondazione
Cariplo under the programme “RICERCA SOCIALE: SCIENZA TECNOLOGIA E SOCIETÀ”.



Notes
  1
       https://www.rainews.it/tgr/sicilia/articoli/2021/05/sic-vaccino-astrazeneca-morte-stefano-pater-
no-siracusa-1b41803d-f54c-4ce7-8967-04a925f05bc3.html.
   2 https://www.esquire.com/it/lifestyle/tecnologia/a36076270/vaccino-astrazeneca-trombosi/.
   3 https://www.ansa.it/liguria/notizie/2022/05/15/morta-dopo-dose-astrazeneca-la-sua-vita-vale-70-
mila-euro_12579a49-eabf-40bb-9f33-71fa201e8bfe.html.
   4 Pearson correlation coefficient, also known as Pearson’s R, is a measure of the linear relationship
between two variables, and it ranges from -1 to 1. A value of 1 indicates a perfect positive correlation,
meaning that as one variable increases, the other variable increases in a linear fashion. A value of -1 indi-
cates a perfect negative correlation, meaning that as one variable increases, the other variable decreases
in a linear fashion. A value of 0 indicates no correlation between the two variables.
   5 Granger causality is a statistical method used to determine whether one time series is useful in forecasting
another. It is based on the idea that if a time series X helps predict another time series Y, then X “Grang-
er-causes” Y. The method involves comparing the predictive power of two models: one that includes only
past values of Y as predictors, and another that includes both past values of Y and past values of X as predic-
tors. The Granger causality test involves estimating two regression models: one with only lagged values of the
dependent variable (Y), and another with both lagged values of Y and lagged values of the independent varia-
ble (X). The null hypothesis is that X does not Granger-cause Y, which can be tested using a statistical F-test.
   6 The Gini index is a measure of statistical dispersion used to represent the distribution of wealth or in-
come among a population. It ranges from 0 to 1, where 0 represents perfect equality (everyone has an equal
share) and 1 represents perfect inequality (one person has all the wealth or income). In the context of social
media, the Gini index can be used to measure the concentration of retweets among users. By calculating
the Gini index of retweets for a particular topic, researchers can determine how concentrated the retweets
are among a small number of users, or if they are more evenly distributed among a larger number of users.
   7 By converting values to rank order, time series has been normalised on a common scale. The number
of tweets about AstraZeneca is shown on the left and the amount of news on the right of the vertical axis.
   8 The excerpts in the article comply with AOIR’s ethics guidelines and Twitter developer policies
(https://aoir.org/ethics/; https://developer.twitter.com/en/developer-terms/policy).
   9 According to different users statements the “System” can include government agencies, corporations,
financial institutions, and the media. In their view, the “System” operates in secret, outside of public scru-
tiny, and uses its power to manipulate information and events to maintain control over the population.
Pilati and Anselmi                                                                                       120

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