Temporal and geographic analysis of the Hydroxychloroquine controversy in the French Twittosphere

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the urge to find a cure triggered an international race to repurpose known drugs. Chloroquine, and next Hydroxychloroquine, emerged quickly as a promising treatment. While later clinical studies demonstrated its inefficacy and possible dangerous side effects, the drug caused heated and politicized debates at an international scale, and social media appeared to play a crucial role in those controversies. Nevertheless, the situation was largely different between countries. While some of them rejected quickly this treatment as France, others relied on it for their national policies, as Brazil. There is a need to better understand how such international controversies unfold in different national context. To study the relation between the international controversy and its national dynamics, we analyze those debates on Hydroxychloroquine on the French-speaking part of Twitter, focusing on the relation between francophone European and African countries. The analysis of the geographic dimension of the debate revealed the information flow across countries through Twitter's retweet hypergraph. Tensor decomposition of hashtag use across time points out that debates are linked to the local political choices. We demonstrate that the controversial debates find their center in Europe, in particular in France, while francophone Africa has a lower participation to the debates, following their early adoption of the familiar Hydroxychloroquine and rejection of WHO recommendations.