  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.
