1,720,965 research outputs found
Social media ecosystem and disinformation. The dynamics of the debate on nuclear energy, radioactive waste and the atomic conflict narrative.
No full textL'abstract è presente nell'allegato / the abstract is in the attachmen
Wartime And Social Media Ecosystem. Disinformation Strategies And Bridges for Under-The-Radar Platforms
Full text linkMixed Analysis of User Activity, Content, and Networks: Twitter’s Information Cascades on Conspiratorial Pandemics
No full textThe COVID-19 Vaccination Campaign and Disinformation on Twitter: The Role of Opinion Leaders amd Political Social Media Influencers in the Italian Debate on Green Pass
Full text linkLa disinformazione in tempo di guerra. Il ruolo delle piattaforme sottotraccia nell’ecosistema dei social network
No full textWho's fuelling Twitter disinformation on the COVID-19 vaccination campaign? Evidence from a computational analysis of the green pass debate
No full textThe COVID-19 health emergency increased disinformation’s role and fostered a growing fragmentation between conflicting opinions on COVID-19 causes, vaccination policies, and government measures to deal with the pandemic. Studies have found that disinformation sources included private citizens, independent organizations, main-stream online newspapers and even public figures such as politicians, commentators, bloggers etc. In Italy, the Twitter debate ignited a conflict between mainstream positions in favour of restrictions, and more libertarian opinions extremely critical of government mea-sures. Our research investigates, through a computational approach based on digital methods and social network analysis (SNA), opinion leaders’ roles in the Italian green pass debate on Twitter that surfaced in the second half of 2021. Drawing on the classic two-step model of communication, our essay identifies the Italian opinion leaders on Twitter and their content dissemination strategies. Our analysis reveals a limited number of dominant voices interacting in segregated net-works of users. These networks can be considered echo chambers given the verbose and self-referential tweeting activity of their opinion leaders. Moreover, such activity involves spreading disinformation and conspiracy theories through a dissemination strategy aimed at divert-ing the audience from Twitter, towards ‘below-the-radar’ environ-ments (e.g. Rumble), where political views are more radica
Terrapiattismo, Covid-19/5G e altre cospirazioni: la pandemia del complottismo su Twitter
No full textThe Eurabia Conspiracy Theory: Twitter’s Political Influencers, Narratives, and Information Sources
Full text linkIn recent years, conspiracy theories on social media have emerged as a significant issue capable of undermining social perceptions of European integration. Narratives such as the Eurabia doctrine, which would imply an ethnic replacement of the indigenous European population with migrants (Bergmann, 2018), have been a significant resonance. Thanks to computational analysis, we have collected data from Twitter over three years (2020, 2021, and 2022) during the Covid-19 pandemic. In this period, we collected over 50,000 tweets strictly related to the Eurabia doctrine topic in different European languages. Analysing the collected data, we identified the most relevant voices spreading conspiracy theories online, the emerging narratives related to the Eurabia doctrine, and the primary sources used by the most active or mentioned subjects in spreading disinformation
Smart working during the Covid19 pandemic in Italy: Twitter narratives in female-centered communities.
Full text linkWhile the recent pandemic has accelerated the spread of smart working dynamics in Italy, social media increased their importance as platforms to vehiculate information and points of view and shape public opinion. In the face of extended confinement and a looming health crisis, society has had to fundamentally rethink its daily work practices, social relations, family relationship management, and work-life balance. As a result, the radical and abrupt migration to networked platforms has been a disruptive and unprecedented phenomenon. We aimed to investigate the Twitter debate on smart working during the pandemic by focusing mainly on social concerns and thematics related to work-life balance by addressing the following research questions: RQ1: How was the topic of smart working debated on Twitter during the Covid19 pandemic (2020-2021) in Italy, and which narratives and issues fuelled the debate the most? RQ2: How the public debate has received the Italian government's worklife balance measures?RQ3: Which topics were most discussed by women on smart working? We used Digital Methods to cope with re-proposing data to depict collective phenomena, social transformations, and cultural expressions by analyzing natively digital data on social media platforms. We gathered more than 750.000 tweets between 28 February 2020 and 30 November 2021, and we mapped narratives and communities by using social network analysis. This allowed for the selection of the more intriguing ones to define various sub-datasets on which to conduct a topic modeling study, which aided in understanding more nuanced aspects of the highly fragmented topic. By studying the italian debate, we identified specific communities which debated government measures to help families during the pandemic and discussed digitalization and smart working as a new paradigm for work. We found DAD (Didactic at Distance, aka homeschooling) as a transversal topic that highly affected how people experienced smart working
Regulating Disinformation and Ideological Entrepreneurs: An Exploratory Research on the Digital Services Act Implementation
Full text linkThe introduction of the Digital Services Act (DSA) by the EU marks a fundamental step in the governance of social media platforms, by outlining content-moderation guidelines aimed at preventing disinformation and the systemic risks related to the "business of polarization" for the digital public sphere (Geese, 2023). According to others (Husovec, 2023b), DSA is an ambitious legal framework that must be tamed in consideration of the priorities of different stakeholders: platforms, legislators at the European and national level, journalists responding to the challenges of fact-checking, and citizens entitled to participate in a safe and non-discriminatory public sphere. Thanks to a critical approach (Van Dijck, 2021; Zuboff, 2019), the article discusses how platforms manage controversial political influencers: the ideological entrepreneurs. From the point of view of the empirical analysis, the essay identifies ambiguities in the DSA text that neither clarify the role of ideological entrepreneurs nor explicitly outline the concept of disinformation. Furthermore, a longitudinal analysis (18 months) of the content moderation measures implemented in compliance with the DSA and accessible thanks to the DSA Transparency Database, shows that social media platforms tend to privilege temporary measures such as accounts suspension, rather than more effective actions such as deplatforming (Van Dijck et al., 2023). This reflects ongoing tensions in the regulation of digital services, especially when balancing innovation in governance with the protection of the democratic information environment. As a result, the article highlights a double-standard policy adopted by platforms towards the influencers: On one side they actively contribute to feeding the flow of disinformation and fake news, but on the other hand, they enable platforms to generate visibility and traffic, thus reinforcing the "business of polarization" typical of surveillance capitalism
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