A cure worse than the disease? The controversy on Twitter around a fake COVID-19 treatment from France

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