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Social media play a key role in shaping citizens' political opinion. According to the Eurobarometer, the percentage of EU citizens employing online social networks on a daily basis has increased from 18% in 2010 to 48% in 2019. The…
Online social media play a major role in shaping public discourse and opinion, especially during political events. We present the first public multi-platform dataset of Italian-language political conversations, focused on the 2022 Italian…
We investigate the presence (and the influence) of disinformation spreading on online social networks in Italy, in the5-month period preceding the 2019 European Parliament elections. To this aim we collected a large-scale dataset oftweets…
Social media has become extremely influential when it comes to policy making in modern societies, especially in the western world, where platforms such as Twitter allow users to follow politicians, thus making citizens more involved in…
Targeted advertising on online social platforms has become increasingly relevant in the political marketing toolkit. Monitoring political advertising is crucial to ensure accountability and transparency of democratic processes. Leveraging…
Targeted online advertising is on the forefront of political communication, allowing hyper-local advertising campaigns around elections and issues. In this study, we employ a new resource for political ad monitoring -- Facebook Ads Library…
Social networks play an important role in people's daily socialization, particularly through social media platforms, which have become key channels for communication and information dissemination. The digital ecosystem does not only evolve…
According to the Eurobarometer report about EU media use of May 2018, the number of European citizens who consult on-line social networks for accessing information is considerably increasing. In this work we analyze approximately $10^6$…
The recent availability of large, high-resolution data sets of online human activity allowed for the study and characterization of the mechanisms shaping human interactions at an unprecedented level of accuracy. To this end, many efforts…
Background. In Italy, in recent years, vaccination coverage for key immunizations as MMR has been declining to worryingly low levels. In 2017, the Italian Gov't expanded the number of mandatory immunizations introducing penalties to…
Politicians with large media visibility and social media audiences have a significant influence on public discourse. Consequently, their dissemination of misinformation can have profound implications for society. This study investigated the…
The rising attention to the spreading of fake news and unsubstantiated rumors on online social media and the pivotal role played by confirmation bias led researchers to investigate different aspects of the phenomenon. Experimental evidence…
The huge amount of data made available by the massive usage of social media has opened up the unprecedented possibility to carry out a data-driven study of political processes. While particular attention has been paid to phenomena like…
Social Media have been extensively used for commercial and political communication, besides their initial scope of providing an easy-to-use outlet to produce and consume user-generated content. Besides being a popular medium, Social Media…
Twitter is one of the most popular social media platforms in the country, but pre-pandemic vaccination debate has been shown to be polarized and siloed into echo chambers. It is thus imperative to understand the nature of this discourse,…
In this work we study how pervasive is the presence of disinformation in the Italian debate around immigration on Twitter and the role of automated accounts in the diffusion of such content. By characterising the Twitter users with an…
In February 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. This event had global repercussions, especially on the political decisions of European countries. As expected, the role of Italy in the conflict became a major campaign…
The advent of social media changed the way we consume content favoring a disintermediated access and production. This scenario has been matter of critical discussion about its impact on society. Magnified in the case of Arab Spring or…
Transmitting messages in the most efficient way as possible has always been one of politicians main concerns during electoral processes. Due to the rapidly growing number of users, online social networks have become ideal platforms for…
We present an analysis of the dynamics of discussions in Twitter (before it became X) among supporters of various candidates in the 2022 French presidential election, and followers of different types of media. Our study demonstrates that we…