Giada Marino

As much as the field of mis/disinformation studies flourished during the last few years, the efforts to measure its prevalence and effects are often hindered or significantly limited by the fuzziness of the phenomenon under study. Differently from approaches based on sole content or actors detection, the authors implement an integrated approach to understand the interplay between manipulative actors, deceptive behavior, and harmful content. To do so, the authors present a study on patterns of coordinated activity on Facebook (named “Coordinated Link Sharing Behavior”) during the first and second waves of the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy. Coordinated Link Sharing Behavior” (CLSB) refers to the coordinated shares of the same news article in a very short timeframe by networks of pages, groups, and verified public profiles. CLSB is a strategy used to boost the reach of content by gaming algorithms that govern the distribution of posts. Additionally, this coordinated activity has been prov...

This report presents the outcomes of a project aimed at developing and testing a prototype tool that supports and speeds-up the work of fact-checkers and de-bunkers by surfacing and ranking potentially problematic information circulated on social media with a content-agnostic approach. The tool itself is the result of a multi-year research activity carried on within the Mapping Italian News Research Program of the University of Urbino Carlo Bo to study the strategies, tactics and goals of information operations aimed at manipulating the Italian public opinion by exploiting the vulnerabilities of the contemporary media ecosystem. This research activity led to developing original studies, public reports, new methods, maps and tools employed to study the activity of Italian nefarious social media actors aimed at amplifying the reach and impact of problematic information by coordinating their efforts. Tracking these actors proved instrumental to observe the “infodemic” unraveling during...

In this article, we reconstruct the academic discourse surrounding social media and elections in an Italian context. We follow Neumayer and Rossi’s conceptualization of academic discourse concerning political protest and digital technology as constructed out of three components: (a) the social phenomena under investigation, (b) technological development, and (c) methods and techniques. In the context of social media and elections, these three components may be identified as (a) the research questions that researchers seek to answer, (b) the social media platforms and data used for the analysis, and (c) the methods adopted to analyze the data. While these three dimensions are deeply intertwined, we argue that, when analyzed independently, it is possible to better see both the longitudinal evolution of each dimension and their interdependencies.

This paper analyzes the literature on problematic COVID-19 information published at the onset of the pandemic in 2020. It explores how scientific research has addressed this issue from a disciplinary, methodological and substantive perspective in different world regions. Three hundred seventy-eight articles were analyzed using content analysis and computational methods, including social network analysis and text mining. The study revealed a multidisciplinary field characterized by substantial contributions from medicine and social sciences and with a certain degree of interdisciplinarity and international collaborations. Research devoted particular attention to infodemic and conspiracy theories and their impact on compliance with health-protective behaviors, and showed a general preference for quantitative methods such as surveys. Most contributions focused on European and Americas regions and were from authors working in the same areas. Attention to various topics was also geograph...

In the context of a larger study on the spread of COVID-19 related mis/disinformation in Italy, we detected a network of 10 Facebook Pages that performed Coordinated Link Sharing. The potential reach of the network is significant, with a cumulative subscriber count close to 2 millions users. Each month, the network publishes more than 6,500 posts. The large majority of posts are links (83%), followed by status (8%) and photos (7%). However, 8 over 10 photos also include links in the message/description of the post. The current goal of the network is to drive traffic to the tg24-ore.com domain, a news source that, according to NewsGuard, fails to meet all the basic journalistic standards, is anonymous and publishes false news about health and partisan right-wing stories without disclosing their editorial line.The network has a long history of activity. It was spotted as performing coordinated link sharing behaviour on highly polarized and false political content in the lead-up to 2018 and 2019 Italian elections (see elections report). The report reconstructs the full list of different domains used by this network from 2017 on and points out to a brand new domain currently used (notiziariodelweb.com). Several of the domains shared by this network are featured in fact-checkers black-lists. 35 news stories posted by this network have been rated as false or misleading by Facebook’s Italian third-party fact-checker. Despite this, the posts linking to these 35 stories have been cumulatively viewed over six million times and clicked more than five hundred thousand times between 2017 and 2019 on Facebook. The domain howtodofor.com was also shared by this network. An analysis of the core Facebook network that shares this domain is available in the second report of this series. The network also serves as a paradigmatic example of how memes page can be repurposed to share highly problematic content as the content posted shifted suddenly from photos to links in the months preceding 2018 Italian general election. A diachronic analysis of the networks’ coordinated links sharing activities, clearly highlights an escalation of the operation that started immediately after the fall of the “yellow-green” government supported by a coalition of M5S and League. The activity further intensifies from the COVID-lockdown on.

In the context of a larger study on the spread of Covid-19 related mis/disinformation in Italy, we detected a network of 34 Facebook Pages that performed Coordinated Link Sharing. The potential reach of the network is significant with a cumulative subscriber count of over 6 million users. Each month, the network publishes more than 20,000 posts. Due to the number of posts and users, the interaction rate is relatively low with less than 0.05 interaction per user in a month. Despite that, top monthly posts have been shared thousands of times. The large majority of content posted consists of inspirational sentences conveyed as image macros. However, 10% of the photo includes links in the message/description of the post. During mid-October, the network started posting links to well-respected journalistic news sources such as La Repubblica and La Stampa. We hypothesize that the aim of this strategy is to meddle with Facebook’s policy that prioritizes news from trustworthy publications and/or to mitigate the effects of circulation penalties gained by violating the platform community standards. The goal of the network is to drive traffic to the billoccino.com domain and monetize by selling online parapharmaceutical products (e.g. dietary supplements).

This proposal is a follow-up of the project “Mapping Italian News Media Political Coverage in the Lead-up to 2018 General Election” (MINE). MINE aimed at creating a comprehensive map of the political news coverage created by the Italian online news media in the lead-up to 2018 general election. The final report of the project highlighted how the populist narrative dominated the news (both in terms of volume of coverage and Facebook engagement), and pinpointed the diverging patterns of Facebook interactions employed by different partisan communities to amplify the reach of the contents aligned with their worldview by sharing the news stories on social media, while trying to reframe, through comments, the negative coverage of the party they support. These insights led to further questions concerning the nature of the observed diverging patterns of Facebook interactions around political news. In particular, we wondered if the observed patterns were the result of a spontaneous grassroot...

The ongoing radical transformations in communication ecosystems have brought up concerns about the risks of partisan selective exposure and ideological polarization. Traditionally, partisan selective exposure is measured by cross-tabulating survey responses to questions on vote intentions and media consumption. This process is expensive, limits the number of news outlets taken into account and is prone to the typical biases of self-reported data. Building upon previous works and with a specific focus on the online media environment, we introduce a new method to measure partisan media attention in a multi-party political system using Twitter data from 2018 Italian general election. Our first research question addresses the effectiveness of this method by measuring the extent to which our estimates correlate with partisan newspaper consumption measured by the latest Italian National Election Studies (ITANES) survey. Once established the reliability of our method, we employ these score...

In this paper, we discuss implications that the lockdown experience had on goals, methodological approaches, and topics of interest of a longitudinal study that we are conducting on political opinion polarization among Italian citizens in the hybrid media system. We also present some of the data collected in the first wave of our survey, fielded in May 2020, after two months of media shock. We provide a preliminary snapshot of the "state" of polarization concerning some controversial issues about the protection of public health. Additionally, we discuss some relations between citizens’ "older" and "newer" media experiences during the lockdown and the likelihood of assuming extreme positions on these topics. Lastly, we address some analytical choices to be taken in the next stages of our study (“phase 2”).

Italy was the first Western democracy to experience mass lockdown in response to COVID-19. In the early stages of the pandemic, citizens' trust in the government increased and journalists “indexed” to institutional sources; however, elite polarization was not long in coming, in tandem with an infodemic. Rooted in this context, this longitudinal study investigates Italian citizens' positions on an issue which lies at the very heart of democracy: the balance between public health and individual freedoms. Findings indicate that citizens' opinions did not polarize between extreme communitarian and libertarian stances. On the contrary, a significant majority of citizens expressed strong beliefs in the primacy of public health over their freedoms. Extreme libertarians were only a minority, and their positions were driven by a completely different vision of the news reliability of “older” and “newer” media arenas, different attitudes toward the “official truth,” and different l...

In this paper we present some preliminary findings from an ongoing research on a comprehensive corpus of 378 interdisciplinary studies about misinformation and COVID-19 published in 2020, focusing on the role of social media platforms in spreading and countering mis- and disinformation. We followed the PRISMA guidelines for systematic reviews to collect and screen results, and a coding scheme based on methodological and substantive questions to analyze them. The preliminary results show, among others, that research on COVID-19 misinformation reproduces a well-known trend of differentiated attention to social media platforms based on both popularity among users and ease of access to data by scholars, that online survey distributed via social media has been a very popular approach, and the presence of a wide range of perspectives, and sometimes diverging point of views, on problematic information, in terms of prevalence of misinformation, countermeasures, and the role of social media ...

In the context of a larger study on the spread of COVID-19 related mis/disinformation in Italy, we detected a network of 26 Facebook Pages that performed Coordinated Link Sharing. The potential reach of the network is significant, with a cumulative subscriber count close to 6 million users. Each month, the network publishes more than 18,000 posts. Half of the posts are type photos (64%), followed by status (22%) and links (14%). However, one third of the photos include links in the message/description of the post. The goal of the network is to drive traffic to the howtodofor.com domain, a news source that, according to NewsGuard, fails to meet several basic journalistic standards and republished articles from other media without mentioning the original source. The network is organized in different clusters that, beside various forms of links pointing to the main domain, also post the same image macros at approximately the same time. These types of posts tend to perform better in terms of volume of interaction received. Beside the obvious economic driver, one specific cluster also appears to be ideologically motivated. Over the year, the network experimented with different strategies aimed at maximizing the exposure of their content and, possibly, sidestepping Facebook’s community standard. Starting in March, a growing number of the links shared are posted in the first comment of click-bait posts (either photos or status). More recently, the network also started posting links to well-respected journalistic news sources such as La Repubblica and La Stampa.

Social media, as many scholars have shown, can be used to influence political behavior through coordinated disinformation campaigns in which participants pretend to be ordinary citizens. With a specific reference to Facebook, a recent study has spotlighted patterns of coordinated activity aimed at fueling online circulation of specific news stories before the 2018 and 2019 Italian elections, an activity called by the authors “Coordinated Link Sharing Behavior” (CLSB). More precisely, CLSB refers to the coordinated shares of the same news articles in a very short time by networks of entities composed by Facebook pages, groups and verified public profiles. The uncertainty related to the coronavirus outbreak is a unique chance for malicious actors to leverage the anxiety of online publics to reach their goals, filling the information void with problematic content. Considering the association between coordination, media manipulation, and problematic information, the entities involved in...

ABSTRACT Over the last few years, a proliferation of attempts to define, understand and fight the spread of problematic information in contemporary media ecosystems emerged. Most of these attempts focus on false content and/or bad actors detection. In this paper, we argue for a wider ecological focus. Using the frame of media manipulation and a revised version of the ‘coordinated inauthentic behavior’ original definition, the paper presents a study based on an unprecedented combination of Facebook data, accessed through the CrowdTangle API, and two datasets of Italian political news stories published in the run-up to the 2018 Italian general election and 2019 European election. By focusing on actors’ collective behavior, we identified several networks of pages, groups, and verified public profiles (‘entities’), that shared the same political news articles on Facebook within a very short period of time. Some entities in our networks were openly political, while others, despite sharing political content too, deceptively presented themselves as entertainment venues. The proportion of inauthentic entities in a network affects the wideness of the range of news media sources they shared, thus pointing to different strategies and possible motivations. The paper has both theoretical and empirical implications: it frames the concept of ‘coordinated inauthentic behavior’ in existing literature, introduces a method to detect coordinated link sharing behavior and points out different strategies and methods employed by networks of actors willing to manipulate the media and public opinion.

The year 2016 marked a turning point in the history of relationships between the Internet, social media, public opinion, and politics. Online practices of grassroots participation, which used to be considered the prerogative of democratizing forces fighting established powers, turned out to be an effective platform for far-right extremists. In the attempt of making sense of what happened and developing workable solutions, stakeholders rapidly moved through the different stages of grief, ranging from denial to anger and acceptance. As a case in point, we trace the path through these stages which moved from an initial denial of the problem to concern over “fake news” and hoaxes, to finally focus on the behaviour of certain actors on the platform. Starting from such present-day phase, we analyze “coordinated inauthentic behaviour”, a concept only briefly defined in Facebook public statements which, nevertheless, is useful to frame future studies insofar both the idea of coordination an...

This study presents an analysis of the online media coverage in the run up to 2018 Italian General election. We illustrate how immigration, corruption and privileges of the elite – also related to a certain rhetoric on the inability of the state to protect the rights of the needy – were in fact the most salient topics throughout the months before and during the election. Both topics were largely central in both Salvini’s League and Di Maio’s Five Stars Movement agenda. Nevertheless, the leaders most frequently cited in online news articles were Matteo Renzi (PD) and Silvio Berlusconi (Forza Italia). By deep diving into the contents of main leaders media coverage and respective social media engagement we document the centrality of stories unravelling around leaders’ legal issues, alleged collusion and scandals. While the media clusters emerging from the network analysis clearly resembles the tripartite structure of the contemporary Italian politics articulated in centre-left, centre-right and Five Stars Movement, the different weight and articulation within each cluster clearly describe the strengths of M5S and centre-right (largely dominated by the League) and the weakness of the centre-left. While our analysis depicted a clear profile of the actors and topics that catalyzed the highest social media interactions and thus attention, we also illustrate a number of strategies employed by different communities to amplify the reach of contents aligned with own worldview while reframing negative coverage through comments. Overall, explicitly partisan and hyper-partisan sources catalyzed a significant share of the social media interactions performed by the online audience in the lead up of the election. The analysis includes the evaluation and mapping of the Italian media landscape from several perspectives and is based on large-scale data collection of online news articles published on the web, shared and interacted on Facebook and Twitter.

ABSTRACT The paper considers how social media ecologies are affecting partisan engagement around political news and online attention economies by investigating the case of the 2018 Italian general election. By analyzing Twitter and Facebook interactions around political news in the lead-up to the election, we shed light on levels of insularity characterizing sources preferred by different partisan communities and investigate how specific patterns of active attention emerge around different sources and around stories proposing different framing of specific political actors. Our findings indicate that, on Twitter, sources mainly shared by supporters of populist parties (the Five Star Movement and the League) are characterized by higher levels of insularity compared to those shared by supporters of other parties. We also find that, on Facebook, news items published by highly insular sources receive a higher number of shares per comment. Finally, our analyses show that news presenting a positive framing of the Five Star Movement – the unique ‘cyber party’ in the system – receives a higher number of shares per comment compared to items presenting the Movement in a negative light, while the opposite is true for stories on all other political parties.

This study presents an analysis of the online media coverage in the run up of 2018 Italian General election. We illustrate how immigration, corruption and privileges of the elite – also related to a certain rhetoric on the inability of the state to protect the rights of the needy – were in fact the most salient topics throughout the months before and during the election. Both topics were largely central in both Salvini’s League and Di Maio’s Five Stars Movement agenda. Nevertheless, the leaders most frequently cited in online news articles were Matteo Renzi (PD) and Silvio Berlusconi (Forza Italia). By deep diving into the contents of main leaders media coverage and respective social media engagement we document the centrality of stories unravelling around leaders’ legal issues, alleged collusion and scandals. While the media clusters emerging from the network analysis clearly resembles the tripartite structure of the contemporary Italian politics articulated in centre-left, centre-...

Despite widespread concern over the role played by disinformation during recent electoral processes, the intrinsic elusiveness of the subject hinders efforts aimed at estimating its prevalence and effect. While there has been proliferation of attempts to define, understand and fight the spread of problematic information in contemporary media ecosystems, most of these attempts focus on detecting false content and/or bad actors. For instance, several existing studies rely on lists of problematic content or news media sources compiled by fact-checkers. However, these lists may quickly become obsolete leading to unreliable estimates. Using media manipulation as a frame, along with a revised version of the “coordinated inauthentic behavior” original definition, in this paper, we argue for a wider ecological focus. Leveraging a method designed to detect “coordinated links sharing behavior” (CLSB), we introduce and assess an approach aimed at creating and keeping lists of potentially problematic sources updated by analyzing the URLs shared on Facebook by public groups, pages, and verified profiles. We show how CLSB is consistently associated with higher risks of encountering problematic news sources across three different datasets of news stories and can be thus used as a signal to support manual and automatic detection of problematic information.