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Institute of Biomedical Ethics and History of Medicine (IBME)

The anti-Green Pass rhetoric in Italy is shaped by anti-vaccine views and focuses on limitations of personal freedom: A social listening analysis on Telegram chats

While many social media platforms start putting in place measures to limit the spread of vaccine-related fake news, individuals and movements holding strong anti-vax views have started to deplatform towards Telegram, as it promises a unique combination of privacy and outreach. But how private are actually these conversations? What do these individuals discuss about? They leverage a lot on the concept of 'freedom', but what model of freedom do they refer to? What are their fears, and what are they willing to do in order to avoid what they perceive as an 'Orwellian dystopia'? Most importantly: should we really use these instruments of active social listening to spy on people? Read about this (and much more) in the latest paper by Giovanni Spitale,  Nikola Biller-Andorno and Federico Germani. Preprint available here

As today begins the international open access week - and open access is just one component of open science - the authors would also like to highlight some good practices that were adopted for this paper, and should become the norm in research:

- open source: the software developed for this study was written using a FOSS language and is available to everyone through a Zenodo repo under a Creative Commons license.

- open educational resources: the software is structured in a Jupyter notebook, so every block of code is heavily commented, explaining what the code does and why. This helps others to study it and to learn by doing and tinkering.

- open peer review: the paper has been submitted to a journal which guarantees an open peer review policy, i.e. reviewers are not anonymous, and anyone who is interested and has specific expertise on the topic can write a review

- open access: even if the open access model is not free of economical and thus moral tensions (APCs), we do believe that there should be no barriers - financial, technical or legal - to access knowledge. Open access is de facto an accelerator for scientific research and an instrument of fairness and equity. Therefore this paper follows both the green route (self-archiving in an open repository) and the golden route (submission to a full open access journal).