Alessandro Artoni | Searcharxiv

arXiv2020

HoaxItaly: a collection of Italian disinformation and fact-checking stories shared on Twitter in 2019

We released over 1 million tweets shared during 2019 and containing links to thousands of news articles published on two classes of Italian outlets: (1) disinformation websites, i.e. outlets which have been repeatedly flagged by journalists and fact-checkers for producing low-credibility content such as false news, hoaxes, click-bait, misleading and hyper-partisan stories; (2) fact-checking websites which notably debunk and verify online news and claims. The dataset, which includes also title and body for approximately 37k news articles, is publicly available at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/ PGVDHX.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2019

Investigating Italian disinformation spreading on Twitter in the context of 2019 European elections

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 associated to thousands of news articles published on Italian disinformation websites. In the observation period,a few outlets accounted for most of the deceptive information circulating on Twitter, which focused on controversialand polarizing topics of debate such as immigration, national safety and (Italian) nationalism. We found evidence ofconnections between different disinformation outlets across Europe, U.S. and Russia, which often linked to each otherand featured similar, even translated, articles in the period before the elections. Overall, the spread of disinformation onTwitter was confined in a limited community, strongly (and explicitly) related to the Italian conservative and far-rightpolitical environment, who had a limited impact on online discussions on the up-coming elections.

cs.SI↗