Patterns of Facebook Interactions around Insular and Cross-Partisan Media Sources in the Run-up of the 2018 Italian Election

Before, during, and after the 2018 Italian election, several controversial cases raised concerns over the impact of problematic information on the democratic process. Mapping Italian News (MINE) was designed to address these concerns by analyzing a set of political news stories and their patterns of engagement on Facebook and Twitter. We estimated the political leaning and insularity of 634 news sources, found that populist parties tend to rely on insular media sources, and detected patterns of interactions on Facebook that seem to be significantly affected by the insularity of the source and the sentiment toward different political actors. This project is conceived as a follow-up of MINE. Limits in publicly available data hindered investigating the crucial question of whether the observed behaviors of online partisan communities are strategically organized or spontaneously grassroots. Grounded in existing literature, we thus designed a set of measures and related research questions to tackle this issue.

在2018年意大利大选之前、期间以及之后，诸多争议性案例引发了人们对于问题信息对民主进程影响的关注。《意大利新闻映射》（MINE）项目旨在解决这一问题，通过对一系列政治新闻报道及其在Facebook和Twitter上的互动模式进行分析。我们评估了634个新闻来源的政治倾向和封闭性，发现民粹主义政党倾向于依赖封闭的媒体来源，并检测到Facebook上的互动模式似乎受到来源的封闭性和对不同政治人物的情感倾向的显著影响。本项目作为MINE项目的延续，旨在探究在线政党社区的行为是否为战略性地组织还是自发性的草根运动。鉴于现有文献，我们因此设计了一套测量方法和相关研究问题，以应对这一关键议题。