Poland’s efforts to combat COVID-19 were hindered by endemic vaccination hesitancy and the prevalence of opponents to pandemic restrictions. In this environment, the policy of a COVID-19 vaccination mandate faces strong resistance in the public debate. Exploring the discourse around this resistance could help uncover the motives and develop an understanding of vaccination hesitancy in Poland. This paper aims to conduct a social network analysis and content analysis of Twitter discussions around the intention of the Polish Ministry of Health to introduce mandatory vaccinations for COVID-19. Twitter was chosen as a platform to study because of the critical role it played during the global health crisis. Twitter data were retrieved from 26 July to 9 December 2021 through the API v2 for Academic Research, and analysed using NodeXL and Gephi. When conducting social network analysis, nodes were ranked by their betweenness centrality. Clustering analysis with the Clauset–Newman–Moore algorithm revealed two important groups of users: advocates and opponents of mandatory vaccination. The temporal trends of tweets, the most used hashtags, the sentiment expressed in the most popular tweets, and correlations with epidemiological data were also studied. The results reveal a substantial degree of polarisation, a high intensity of the discussion, and a high degree of involvement of Twitter users. Vaccination mandate advocates were consistently more numerous, but less engaged and less mobilised to “preach” their own stances. Vaccination mandate opponents were vocal and more mobilised to participate: either as original authors or as information diffusers. Our research leads to the conclusion that systematic monitoring of the public debate on vaccines is essential not only in counteracting misinformation, but also in crafting evidence-based as well as emotionally motivating narratives.

The domain of policymaking, which used to be limited to small groups of specialists, is now increasingly opening up to the participation of wide collectives, which are not only influencing government decisions, but also enhancing citizen engagement and transparency, improving service delivery and gathering the distributed wisdom of diverse participants. Although collective intelligence has become a more common approach to policymaking, the studies on this subject have not been conducted in a systematic way. Nevertheless, we hypothesized that methods and strategies specific to different types of studies in this field could be identified and analyzed. Based on a systematic literature review, as well as qualitative and statistical analyses, we identified 15 methods and revealed the dependencies between them. The review indicated the most popular approaches, and the underrepresented ones that can inspire future research.

In this study, we focus on models of civic debate suitable for use in Polish-Ukrainian internet projects, as well as methods of researching collective intelligence that can help to monitor particular aspects of such debates and consequently create social bridging capital between these groups. The dynamic socio-political situation of recent years, both in Ukraine and in Poland, has created new conditions. Anti-government protests and social turmoil related to the war in Crimea and Donbas, as well as a high level of migration in the region in a short period led to the creation of a multi-ethnic society. This brings opportunities for the development of a new type of social capital: A new participative model of social life based on internet projects, with a relatively low entry barrier, space for creativity, and the widespread use of ICT technologies, can provide the new ways of debating, civic engagement, and collective action. Our research, based on a multidisciplinary literature review, as well as a series of qualitative in-depth interviews (IDIs), proved that the selected collective intelligence (CI) research methods and debate models can help to develop internet communities that will contribute to building bridging capital between Poles and Ukrainians.