Analysis of the online controversy surrounding Covid-19 vaccines in Africa

35° Nord and Afriques Connectées, a laboratory that analyses viralphenomena on social media in Africa, joined forces to monitor andanalyse discussions concerning Covid-19 on African social networks.

35° Nord and Afriques Connectées have produced this study on theinformation dissemination patterns and the origins of the onlinecontroversy sparked by the comments made by two Frenchresearchers and doctors on French TV channel LCI on 1 April.

Aprii 2020

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Summary of the study & key findings

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Highlights - The 35°Nord eye

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Video x Twitter x viral hashtag: a totally volatile cocktail for sparking a bad buzz

The amplification of the buzz and multiplication of the support was enabled by the combination of ahighly commented subject at the time (Covid-19) and a topic that rapidly crystallizes opinions (racism).

The double power of the main multipliers of the controversy: the legitimacy to deal with the subject andtheir audience.

Racism is a social issue that generates a sounding board for Internet users who want to contribute to theoutrage.

Video, which is becoming an almost indispensable ally for companies, organisations and personalities, canalso do more damage than image or text, developing a "soap opera" effect on social media.

The media can amplify the story by publishing articles about the controversy and its negative buzz, ratherthan about the initial remarks that led to the controversy.

In such a volatile situation, one has to first contain the crisis. Even though INSERM reacted within a fewhours, its initial response seemed inadequate, creating a form of crisis within the crisis, stalling the hopethat the backlash would subside.

In situations such as this, a mea-culpa from the main players is often effective, provided it at least takesthe form of the content that led to the controversy.

Key points in the dissemination of the controversy

The existence of easy-to-share video material from a French TV channel that isknown and recognised outside of France was an aggregator and a catalyst forcommentary. This document, which served as tangible proof, was massivelydisseminated in video format (generating millions of views) or via screenshots.

International sports and music stars from Africa and the diaspora played the roleof triggering and amplifying the controversy. Taking advantage of their largeonline audiences, they lent credibility to the outrage and provided visibility of thecontroversy to general public audiences on both continents.

INSERM's reaction, in two stages (denial then apology), did little to calm thestorm, which was rekindled by subsequent media publications, covering thesubject to prolong the indignation of these famous celebrities as well as to swellthe wave of anger that swept through social media and targeting the tworesearchers and their professional bodies.

Although the celebrity voices generated considerable levels of engagement, thiscontroversy remains a popular topic, as can be seen from the large volume ofposts that we could describe as ‘citizen expression’, or online public opinion.Some of these tweets found high popularity despite their authors' small following.

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Background & analysed data

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#1

Background to the controversy

On 1 April this year, INSERM (French National Institute of Health andMedical Research) researcher Camille Locht and Dr. Jean-Paul Mirafrom Cochin Hospital appeared on the LCI rolling news channel toexchange views about the development of potential vaccines forcombating the Covid-19 crisis.

In what he himself suggested might be “provocative”, Jean-Paul Mirasuggested testing vaccines in Africa and on fragile populations, as hadpreviously been done on “prostitutes” a few years back. Camille Lochtagreed and said that there was going to be a call for proposals to whichINSERM would certainly respond.

This short discussion did not go unnoticed and led to a huge wave ofindignation on social media, led by Africans and the diaspora. This isundoubtedly one of the first worldwide controversies concerning anAfrican medical and health issue on social media.

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Analysed data

All the Twitter and Facebook reactions and posts resulting from thiscontroversy were collected between between 1 and 9 April, with the helpof the Visibrain platform, to constitute the corpus of the study.

On Twitter, the following query was made to collect data in French:(cobayes OR cobaye) (Afrique OR Africain OR africains) lang:fr (vaccins ORvaccin) (Afrique OR Africains) lang:fr (Cobaye: guinea pig)

Facebook has a less permissive API than Twitter in its sharing andprocessing of data. We used the following operators to harvest publicposts published by Facebook pages: “Jean-Paul Mira” OR “Camille Locht”OR “cobayes africains” OR “BCG Afrique”.

We also crawled the discussions on the pan-Africanist Facebook page “Lapolitique africaine pour les nuls” (African Politics for Dummies) (339,000subscribers).

The study of this online controversy is based on an analysis of theinformation dissemination patterns and visibility levers, an account typologythat weighed in on the dissemination and amplification of this controversy,as well as a study of the conversations that took place on social networks.

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210 000tweets analysés

120 000comptes Twitter ont pris part ou réagi

à la polémique

1 700posts Facebook analysés

1 130pages Facebook ont traité ou

nourri la polémique

400 000Interactions générées sur

Facebook

1 April

- LCI's show airs- First excerpts of the

show, filmed onsmartphone, posted onTwitter

2 April

- -The controversy kicks offon Twitter, and footballand music stars mobilise

- Launch of the Change.orgpetition, shared by Booba

- INSERM publishes a pressrelease to refute theallegations and counterthe criticisms

3 & 4 April

- - Visibility peaks on Twitterand Facebook

- - INSERM publishes itsresearcher Camille Locht'sapologies

- Certains governmentsAfrican institutions (AfricaCDC, WHO, AUDA-NEPAD)began reacting on socialmedia

From 4 April

- Waning residualvisibility

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Controversy timeline

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Twitter is the social media on which thecontroversy spread the fastest. From 2 April,it achieved a volume of more than 60,000tweets, while nearly 300 posts were postedon Facebook on the same day. Thecontroversy peaked on these two socialmedia on 3 April. Visibility began to decreasesimultaneously on Facebook and Twitterbetween 3 and 4 April.

End March

- Vaccines are the subject ofcritical background noiseabout pharmaceuticallobby interests in Africa. Itis one of the drivers of theanti-imperialist onlinenarrative. This is reflectedin the criticism of the BillGates Foundation'swillingness to developvaccines for Africa.

Twitter: quanti analytics

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More than 120,000 Internet users participated inthe controversy, either as contributors orcommentators.In total, there were nearly 210,000 tweets andretweets between 1 April and 9 April,generating more than 430 million potentialimpressions.

The magnitude of the backlash is due to twoconcomitant factors:- the proportion of Internet users who

posted a tweet, instead of RT, is very high: itconcerns more than one in four Internetusers (21,427 in total)

- the RT volume is substantial, with no lessthan 180,000, which enabled thecontroversy to be exported far beyond thecore group of participants who spoke onthe subject on the network

Interesting data: the number of nativelyposted videos in a tweet. Proof of the stormof controversy, 80% of these videos wereposted between 3 and 7 April, giving asecond wind to the backlash that beganwith the first publications of the LCI videoexcerpt.

The existence of the video (and thescreenshots of it) allowed the event to becaptured in a tangible way and encouragedpick-ups and sharing.

Facebook: quanti analytics

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Over 1,700 publications on public pages orgroups generated a potential visibility of morethan 260 million potential impressionsworldwide.

The topic reached a substantial number ofFacebook users, but also generated a highlevel of activity, as shown by the number ofinteractions generated by the 1,710 postsanalysed. On average, each post was liked,commented on and shared more than 2,300times.

As mentioned in the methodological detail,since only partial data collection is possible,these already very high figures are indicativeof an even bigger controversy.

Methodological detail:

Unlike Twitter, Facebook is a semi-public, semi-private network. Facebook’s API is also lesspermissive API than that of Twitter in its sharing andprocessing of data..

It is thus not possible to collect posts posted to privateaccounts or groups, nor comments that appearbelow public page posts or groups.

The data collected on Facebook therefore representsthe public minimum that one is able to collect, on thetotality of comments on the subject.

Community analysis of the controversy

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Salient points of the Twitter analysis:

Massive and broad dissemination of LCI's video excerptvia the social media accounts of sport and music stars.The leveraging of these massively followed accountsgenerated high engagement rates and brought visibilityto the general public in Africa and Europe, beyond thetraditional activist spheres.

This controversy is characterised by a tremendous waveof indignation, as demonstrated by the numerouspersonal statements, or barely shared and isolatedcomments.

The mobilisation of leading African national personalitieson Facebook helped raise the visibility of the subject tomore popular audiences in several countries on thecontinent.

This controversy, which originated on social media on thebasis of a French TV segment, reached the highestechelons by sparking reactions from several Heads ofState.

Key findings

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Methodological details (Twitter mapping)

Over 90,000 Twitter accounts collected, the conversationalrelationships of 44,000 accounts were mapped. The size ofthe nodes (accounts) is proportional to their influencewithin the conversation network (eigenvector centralitystatistical authority filter).The nodes were distributed by conversational andrelational closeness using the Modularity statistical filter(colour coding). These relationships only exist from thetweets retrieved here and not from a relational history.Each colour represents a community.

Close mapping of the 5,500 most influential accounts (according to the Eigenvector centrality statistical filter),ranked and grouped by conversational and relational closeness (Modularity).

French rapper Booba was the first international star toshare the LCI video on the night of 1-2 April. Booba was alsoamong the first major multipliers of a petition hosted onthe Change.org platform. This petition is the most sharedlink on Twitter (8,753 shares over the period), with morethan 130,000 signatures.

Other artists such as Dosseh, Kaaris, Rohff, Fary, as well asfootballers such as Didier Drogba, Demba Ba, OlivierDacourt joined Booba.

By generating thousands of RT and likes, these accountsplayed the real role of amplifying the controversy bywidening the dissemination of the discredited content to aconsiderable audience, the general public, not necessarilypoliticised or familiar with this type of issue. In addition, theonline communities of these sportsmen and artists extendacross Africa as well as France.

L'Equipe's article about Cameroonian footballer SamuelEto'o's outrage on Facebook, published on 2 April, is themost widely tweeted publication with over 2,100 shares.This is the publication that, to a large extent, triggered thewave of coverage by the general French-language media.

International stars, drivers of media attention

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The scale of the controversy and its seriousness in the midstof a global health crisis alerted the World HealthOrganization. The “racist remarks” made by the Frenchresearcher and doctor on LCI were condemned by the WHOvia its Director-General, Dr. Tedros. His statement triggeredthe mobilisation and protests of international institutionalaccounts (@WHO, @onuinfo), as well as that of EmmanuelMacron, who referred to his discussion with Dr. Tedros onthe situation in Africa.

Despite the large number of articles published and sharedon Twitter – over 7,600 – the media's influence in the onlinebacklash was limited. Most of the articles were publishedon 4 April, the day after visibility spiked on social media. RFIand France Info articles were the most RT on Twitter, thefirst on the INSERM researcher's apology, the second on theWHO's reaction.

Pan-Africanist and anti-imperialist activists known on socialnetworks, such as Kemi Seba and Nathalie Yamb, generatehigh levels of engagement without their voices being heardbeyond their traditional communities. The sociologistKaoutar Harchi generated more than 5,000 RT and 7,000likes by condemning the lack of consideration for“racialised women's bodies”.

A diversity of participants mobilised at various levels

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Although Senegal’s President Macky Sall did not react tothe vaccine controversy on his Twitter account, his tweet of2 April following his conversation with President Macron onjoint measures to combat Covid-19 in Africa was widelycommented on by the Senegalese twitter community(#Kebetu). Very active on Twitter, this communitychallenged Macky Sall on the issue of vaccines, urging himto refuse any testing in Senegal.

Furthermore, Senegal's Minister of Health, @abdioufsarr,tweeted the video of his statement on the subject during atelevised discussion on ITV Senegal on 3 April. His tweet,stating that “Africa is nobody's dumping ground”, was the4th most retweeted tweet in Senegal around thiscontroversy.

The mapping shows that Abdioulaye Diouf Sarr links the#Kebetu community to accounts followed by the diasporasuch as @diasporamediaof, which was very active in thiscontroversy. These diaspora accounts are also very close tothose of sportsmen and artists who were multipliers of thecontroversy such as @ndiayegaindesn.

The case of the Senegalese community on Twitter

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Sparked by an excerpt from a French TV programme, thebacklash swelled on Twitter before reaching the highestechelons. Several African presidencies and presidents reacted tothe controversy directly on their Twitter accounts, as did theDirector-General of the World Health Organization.

Note: the French President reacted to the controversy on 15 Aprilon RFI, condemning the two French researchers'“inconsequential remarks”.

High-level reactions on Twitter

On Facebook, African artists enjoying well-established national andcontinent-wide acclaim mobilised massively via their official pages.

Although the most disseminated and shared posts came from theinternationally renowned footballers Samuel Eto'o and DidierDrogba, the mobilisation of African artists helped raise the visibilityof the controversy amongst a larger and more popular Africanaudience than on Twitter. Among the most active on the subjectwere Ivorian actors/producers Michel Gohou and Guy Kalou Emileand singer Alpha Blondy and the Congolese singer Koffi Olomide.

Following the example of celebrity accounts, highly popular news,cultural and activist pages such as First Mag, “Musicians chrétienscongolais” and “La ligue de défense noire africaine” amplified thevisibility of the controversy and generated very high levels ofparticipation.

Unsurprisingly, Internet users expressed their indignation bycommenting on RFI an Le Parisien articles, which were among themost engaging media posts.

Popular celebrities reached a wide audience on Facebook

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Disseminator profiles

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#3

Two disseminator profiles:

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Répartition des tweets

Répartition des comptes

Nombre de followers :

Répartition desimpressions

générées

Two account profile types accounted for the dissemination of the controversy,each with a distinct role:- Small accounts, with fewer than 500 followers, account for the bulk of

citizen mobilisation: they were very active around the controversy - theywrote 70% of the tweets, but generated very little visibility on the socialmedia.

- Sports and music stars, whose accounts have more than 100,000 followers,made two things happen: they triggered media coverage of thecontroversy as soon as they picked up on it, and opened up and spreadthe controversy to the general public, which follows them massively onTwitter.

Although there aren't that many of them in the overallnumber of accounts (they make up barely 0.13% of allaccounts), these personalities generated more thanhalf of the impressions linked to the issue. Theirextremely well-followed accounts thus extended thevisibility of the controversy to barely politicised ormilitant Internet users. They were supported by micro-influencers and influencers, followed by 5,000 to 50,000followers, who, via their dense, active and connectednetworks, mobilised real protest. Some of the mostretweeted tweets (@__realea, @DidiBabeee) wereposted by accounts with only about 1,000 followers,demonstrating how strong this mobilisation of protestwas.

General public and activists, in France and Africa

The interests indicated in the profiles of the accounts that reacted to theremarks made by Camille Locht and Jean-Paul Mira give us an idea of the type ofaudience that was mobilised throughout the controversy. There is a strongprevalence of terms related to sport and culture, reflecting the influence of thestars of these two spheres in disseminating the incident on the social media toless politicised profiles. The community of activist accounts, linked to the politicalvocabulary, was in turn activated by micro-influencer and influencer accounts.

The matter of Internet users' occupations also seems to become clearer in termsof their interests, with a large proportion of them mentioning their profession intheir profile information. It is important to note a high proportion of jobs incommunication and digital fields, which is relatively common on Twitter.

In addition, 26% of the accounts that took part in the controversy on Twitter arelocated in France, particularly in the Ile-de-France region, where there is a largeAfrican diaspora. France has the highest proportion of Internet users, far aheadof Côte d'Ivoire (2%), Belgium (1.9%) and Senegal (1.7%). This breakdown can beexplained in part by the transcontinental fame of the football and music starswho picked up the controversy, beyond the fact that the controversy originatedin France following remarks made by French researchers.

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Mobilisation of the media and communication world

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Several African profiles from themedia and communication worldwere quick to pick up the controversy.

Connected and influential, thesemicro-influencers and influencers ofthe industry were able to rapidlyactivate their networks of Key OpinionLeaders.

African Facebook pages as multipliers

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Facebook user data is less accessible thanthat of Twitter. However, it does tell us thatAfrican Facebook pages rallied strongly onthe issue and thus disseminated thecontroversy, which started with a segmenton a French television channel, to a generalpublic African audience.

While France accounts for more than 21% ofactive pages, the gap with the second mostengaged country, Côte d'Ivoire (10.39%), issmaller than on Twitter. Senegal, third at10%, is ahead of Cameroon at 5%, followedby a host of African countries in the sub-region and lastly Central Africa.

Analysis of the conversations

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Hashtag mapping

1,300 hashtags were used within the 210,000 tweets ofthe analysed corpus. We have mapped them to showthe links between them.

In light blue, the cluster of hashtags from countriesassociated with the main hashtags concerning thepandemic and, to a lesser extent, the WHO response.

In purple, a significant portion of the conversationsfocused on the Democratic Republic of Congo, whichhad said it was in favour of a vaccination campaign forits population, before bowing out in view of the scale ofthe controversy. A number of terms and hashtags referto the colonial aspect, colonial medicine, BigPharmaand racism.

Driven by rapper Kaaris, there is high visibility and use ofthe expression “lab rats”. The reference to animals isalso one of the most recurrent.

Note: absence of a mobilising hashtag in French-language conversations, unlike the#AfricansAreNotGuineaPigs hashtag used by Englishspeakers.

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Anger, mistrust and disapproval are the three main reactions onFacebook.

The most frequently used hashtags in public posts about this issue were,besides contextual ones (coronavirus, vaccine, LCI...), those in opposition(“Y en a marre”, meaning “Fed up”, which is also a civil society movementin Senegal, “no vaccine in Africa”, “Africa is not a laboratory”, etc.) andthose condemning France's racism with regard to Africans, and Africansin general.

The term "mask", found in 10% of the posts, is used to underscoreFrance's ambivalence: France does not have enough masks to protect itsown people, but its priority is supposedly to protect African populations.The word "conspiracy" is also recurrent, used in 6% of posts.

A significant fact: the second most used emoji reaction on the Facebookposts analysed is that of anger, at almost 10%, a high percentage. Whilethe classic ‘like’ is polysemic, the ‘angry’ emoji leaves little doubt as to thefeeling expressed by the Internet users who used it.

Anger reigns on Facebook

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Content invaded by fake news

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The media coverage of the controversy, while focusing on the commentsmade by the two doctors and the ensuing reactions, also addressed a moreglobal aspect of the fight against fake news.

Whether it be articles responding to reader enquiries (such as the workdone by AFP Factuel) or dedicated content (such as this AJ+ video on thehistory of testing in Africa), numerous media outlets covered the subjectfrom the angle of countering disinformation.

The controversy analysed here originated in an area already conducive to the spreadof fake news in the health and medical field. The subject of vaccines, tested ormarketed by Westerners in Africa, crystallized a background noise that had beenconstant since the start of the pandemic (cf. the conspiracies that surfaced a few daysago), but which actually goes back several years.It is a recurring theme of disinformation on social networks, which, like all good fakenews, is founded on fear and conspiracy, and on proven facts, such as this accounttaken from a Planet+ documentary claiming that the United States voluntarilyinoculated the AIDS virus in Africa and an article in Le Monde Diplomatique in June2005 entitled ‘L’Afrique, Cobaye de Big Pharma’ (Africa, Big Pharma's Guinea Pig),both of which resurfaced after the controversy erupted.

Using humour to express outrage

“The five most beautiful African countries to test our newvaccines”, “Several African countries are starting anti-racism drugtrials in Europe.” On 3 April Le Gorafi, a French satirical news site,published an article on the controversy, which was shared morethan 300 times on Twitter.

Its second article on the subject also drew a lot of attention onsocial media, especially from African Internet users.

Irony, alongside satire, was also used by Internet users tocondemn and ridicule the two researchers' comments bycomparing the tests they discussed with those carried out onanimals, arousing widespread outrage.

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Taking it further

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#5

Although the controversy was initially a French one, it quicklyspread to English-speaking spheres in the West and in Africa. InEnglish-speaking circles, the scale of the controversy amountedto a little over 190,000 tweets published between 1 and 8 April.

The dissemination pattern of the controversy was identical tothat of the French-speaking sphere, with a two-day delay.

Here too, numerous celebrities, both African and from thediaspora, from the world of sport and culture, contributed toattracting media attention because of their fame. It is worthnoting, however, that it was mainly French-speaking celebritieswho spread the news to English-speaking audiences, such asDidier Drogba who, through his English tweets, was the first totake the controversy beyond French-speaking borders.

Reaction from English-speaking circles

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Several English-speaking stars then took up the cause and stronglycondemned the remarks made by the two French researchers, but also, moregenerally, the West's attitude towards Africa. British-Nigerian actor andproducer John Boyega, for example, posted a tweet that attracted more than150,000 RT. This tweet, retweeted more than 13K times, shared a video initiallypublished on Tik Tok exposing what the researchers had said, proof that thecontroversy had toured social networks as much as it had toured the world.

Media visibility was also generated by French-speaking celebrities, such asthe article written by Rokhaya Diallo and published in the Washington Post.

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