The impact of fake news on the 2018 Italian election
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.