Reproduce “Identity Emergence in the Context of Vaccine Criticism in France” on OpenResearch

About this paper

Melody Sepahpour-Fard, Michael Quayle, Padraig MacCarron, Shane Mannion, Dong Nguyen

Twitter activity surrounding France’s July 2021 health-pass announcement coincided with the consolidation of a vaccine-critical collective identity. Across 338,641 filtered tweets from 27,016 users, the language shifted from individual to collective self-reference, government remained the central outgroup, and persistent newcomers became more linguistically aligned with established participants.

Key insights

• First-person singular language declined from 22% to 13% of tweets, while first-person plural language rose from 19% to 31%; this transition was concentrated in hashtags rather than ordinary tweet text.
• Government and political authorities were the dominant outgroup, while vaccinated people became more prominent as a contrasting group after the health-pass announcement; critical and derogatory labels were common.
• Persistent newcomers increasingly resembled established users linguistically, whereas transient newcomers remained less cohesive and more focused on vaccination itself, consistent with partial socialization into community norms.

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