(Nearly) Ten Years of Social Media and Political Elections in Italy: Questions, Platforms, and Methods

Abstract

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.

Seven years of studying the associations between political polarization and problematic information: a literature review

“…Italy, Brazil, and Germany emerge as important countries of interest in the sample. The second-largest sample size, consisting of five studies (Bessi et al, 2016;Del Vicario et al, 2016;Zollo, 2019;Pierri et al, 2020;Salvi et al, 2021), comes from Italy, which is not surprising given the country's "pluralistic polarized" political and media systems (Hallin and Mancini, 2011) and its longstanding issues with social media, populist parties, and problematic information consumption (Rossi et al, 2021). Interestingly, half of the papers based on Italian samples also define polarization as echo chambers or selective exposure.…”

Replication Data for: ITA-ELECTION-2022: A multi-platform dataset of social media conversations around the 2022 Italian general election

“…We focus our literature review on the Italian context, and then describe a few datasets related to other countries. We also refer the interested reader to (Rossi, Righetti, and Marino 2021) for an overview of studies that describe the interplay between social media and Italian politics. (Basile, Lai, and Sanguinetti 2018) collect tweets in the Italian language continuously from 2012 to 2018, extracting a number of smaller datasets enriched with different kinds of annotations for linguistic purposes.…”

“…Online social media provide researchers and academics with unprecedented opportunities to observe a wide range of political and societal phenomena (Rossi, Righetti, and Marino 2021). They also play a critical role in shaping public opinion during political events (Vitak et al 2011), and represent a rich source of data to study the interplay between political actors' campaigns (Sahly, Shao, and Kwon 2019), media outlets' agenda settings (Kim et al 2016), and users' news consumption (Allcott and Gentzkow 2017).…”

“…In Italy, as of 2022 1 , YouTube is the platform used by the largest amount of internet users (88%), followed by Meta platforms (64%) and TikTok (54%), whereas Twitter only accounts for approximately 7% 2 . However, previous studies of online social media during Italian elections and referendum mostly focused on Twitter (Rossi, Righetti, and Marino 2021), due to the large availability of data via its APIs. In this work, instead, we present a public data resource of political conversations and user-generated content shared around the 2022 Italian general election, which allows researchers and academics to study multiple social platforms simultaneously.…”