The spreading of fake news has recently attracted the attention of scholarly debate, in light of the potential impact of disinformation on social, economic and political outcomes.
Studies of online disinformation mainly focus upon the problem of its detection. This is done mainly through the automatic recognition of hoaxes, with the purpose of containing their diffusion [Tacchini 2017]. Several papers also study the patterns of how online misinformation spreads [Centola 2010], the aspects distinguishing hoaxes from real news [Shin et al. 2018], and the characteristics of individuals consuming this kind of news. However, our knowledge of the political, social and economic outcomes of fake news is still limited and mostly anecdotal.
We aim to add to this literature by empirically investigating the potential effect of online disinformation on the 2018 political elections in Italy.
The analysis is based on data drawn from Twitter. Given the secrecy of the voting mechanism of Italian electoral system and the privacy settings of online social networks, it is beneficial to conduct the analysis on a macro level rather than base it on that of the individual. We will therefore obtain information about the geolocalization of the tweets and the location of Twitter users to investigate how the spreading of fake news correlates with voter turnout and the electoral performance of political parties across the provinces of Italy.
References
Centola D. (2010). The spread of behavior in an online social network experiment. Science 03 Sep 2010: Vol. 329, Issue 5996, pp. 1194-1197.
Shin, J., Jian, L., Driscoll, K., & Bar, F. (2018). The diffusion of misinformation on social media: Temporal pattern, message, and source. Computers in Human Behavior, 83, 278-287.
Tacchini E., Ballarin G., Della Vedova M. L., Moret S., and de Alfaro L. (2017). Some Like it Hoax: Automated Fake News Detection. in Social Networks. arXiv preprint arXiv:1704.07506.
As reported by Lazer et al. (2018):
`Evaluations of the medium-to-long¿run impact on political behavior of exposure to fake news (for example, whether and how to vote) are essentially nonexistent in the literature¿
This claim greatly supports the need for this type of study as it is innovative in addressing the research gap in this area, since we aim to analyze disinformation effects on political outcomes.
The innovative contribution that this study brings to the pool of knowledge on the topic lies on the following aspects:
1) The subject of study is itself very young in the scientific literature. Even if fake news is not a new phenomenon, the societal impact of disinformation has only recently captured the attention of the academic debate. Most of the studies conducted so far mainly focused on the analysis of the specific characteristics of misinformation and of its patterns of online diffusion (echo chambers). Many studies used automatic identification tools based on the ontological and dynamic characteristics of fake news. The main objective of these studies is develop ways to counteract the phenomenon, identifying and eliminating false information. But, as stated by Lazer, studies on impact of fake news exposure on political behavior are practically non-existent. Yet the need to investigate this connection has made itself felt, in light of what happened in the election campaign in America with Trump, in France with Le Pen, in Britain with Brexit. Is there really a correlation between these political results and exposure to hoaxes? Have hoaxes impacted on political behavior of social actors? These are the questions that this study wants to answer.
2) As far as I know, there are no studies disentangling the possibly different political outcomes of different types of fake news, with a specific focus on voter turnout and the performance of political parties.
3) To our knowledge, this should be the first study analyzing territorial diffusion of fake news using geolocated data coming from social networks;
4) The importance of this project is alsoThe new established government made up of two anti-establishment political forces makes Italy a powerful laboratory for analysis;
5) The data acquisition procedure elaborated in the project and the resulting dataset will possibly be a precious tool to be used in future projects to analyze how disinformation correlates with other economic and social phenomena.
References
Lazer D. M., Baum M. A., Benkler Y., Berinsky A. J., Greenhill K. M., Menczer F., ... & Schudson M. (2018) The science of fake news. Science, 359(6380), 1094-1096.