Who’s fuelling Twitter disinformation on the COVID-19 vaccination campaign? Evidence from a computational analysis of the green pass debate

IF 2.2 Q2 POLITICAL SCIENCE

Contemporary Italian Politics Pub Date : 2023-03-01 DOI:10.1080/23248823.2023.2182735

S. Monaci, Simon Persico

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引用次数: 1

Abstract

ABSTRACT The 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, mainstream 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 measures. 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 networks 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 diverting the audience from Twitter, towards ‘below-the-radar’ environments (e.g. Rumble), where political views are more radical.

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是谁在推特上煽动关于COVID-19疫苗接种运动的虚假信息?来自绿色通行证辩论的计算分析证据

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来源期刊

Contemporary Italian Politics Social Sciences-Political Science and International Relations

CiteScore

4.40

自引率

0.00%

发文量

期刊介绍： Contemporary Italian Politics, formerly Bulletin of Italian Politics, is a political science journal aimed at academics and policy makers as well as others with a professional or intellectual interest in the politics of Italy. The journal has two main aims: Firstly, to provide rigorous analysis, in the English language, about the politics of what is one of the European Union’s four largest states in terms of population and Gross Domestic Product. We seek to do this aware that too often those in the English-speaking world looking for incisive analysis and insight into the latest trends and developments in Italian politics are likely to be stymied by two contrasting difficulties. On the one hand, they can turn to the daily and weekly print media. Here they will find information on the latest developments, sure enough; but much of it is likely to lack the incisiveness of academic writing and may even be straightforwardly inaccurate. On the other hand, readers can turn either to general political science journals – but here they will have to face the issue of fragmented information – or to specific journals on Italy – in which case they will find that politics is considered only insofar as it is part of the broader field of modern Italian studies[...] The second aim follows from the first insofar as, in seeking to achieve it, we hope thereby to provide analysis that readers will find genuinely useful. With research funding bodies of all kinds giving increasing emphasis to knowledge transfer and increasingly demanding of applicants that they demonstrate the relevance of what they are doing to non-academic ‘end users’, political scientists have a self-interested motive for attempting a closer engagement with outside practitioners.