Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted on every human activity and, because of the urgency of finding the proper responses to such an unprecedented emergency, it generated a diffused societal debate. The online version of this discussion was not exempted by the presence of misinformation campaigns, but, differently from what already witnessed in other debates, the COVID-19 -intentional or not- flow of false information put at severe risk the public health, possibly reducing the efficacy of government countermeasures. In this manuscript, we study the effective impact of misinformation in the Italian societal debate on Twitter during the pandemic, focusing on the various discursive communities. In order to extract such communities, we start by focusing on verified users, i.e., accounts whose identity is officially certified by Twitter. We start by considering each couple of verified users and count how many unverified ones interacted with both of them via tweets or retweets: if this number is statically significant, i.e. so great that it cannot be explained only by their activity on the online social network, we can consider the two verified accounts as similar and put a link connecting them in a monopartite network of verified users. The discursive communities can then be found by running a community detection algorithm on this network.We observe that, despite being a mostly scientific subject, the COVID-19 discussion shows a clear division in what results to be different political groups. We filter the network of retweets from random noise and check the presence of messages displaying URLs. By using the well known browser extension NewsGuard, we assess the trustworthiness of the most recurrent news sites, among those tweeted by the political groups. The impact of low reputable posts reaches the 22.1% in the right and center-right wing community and its contribution is even stronger in absolute numbers, due to the activity of this group: 96% of all non reputable URLs shared by political groups come from this community.
Highlights
The advent of the internet and online social media has promoted a more democratic access to information, increasing the offer of news sources, with a significant number of individual contributions too
The online version of this discussion was not exempted by the presence of misinformation campaigns, but, differently from what already witnessed in other debates, the COVID-19 -intentional or not- flow of false information put at severe risk the public health, possibly reducing the efficacy of government countermeasures
In the present paper, using Twitter as a benchmark, we shall consider the effective flow of online misinformation in Italy, one of the countries in Europe that have been affected the most by COVID-19 in Spring, 2020,1 and how this flow affected the various discursive communities, i.e., groups of users that debate on the pandemic
Summary
The advent of the internet and online social media has promoted a more democratic access to information, increasing the offer of news sources, with a significant number of individual contributions too. Unmediated communication channels have (2021) 10:34 generated an incredible amount of low-quality contents, polluting the online debate in several areas, like politics, healthcare, education, and environment [1]. For this reason, in the recent Joint Communication titled “Tackling COVID-19 disinformation – Getting the facts right” (June 10, 2020, https://bit.ly/35C1dGs), the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, while introducing the various d/misinformation campaigns that arose during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic, presented an explicit declaration of intent: “Combating the flow of disinformation, misinformation [. If the observations are not compatible with the null-model, they cannot be explained by the constraints only and carry a non trivial information regarding the real system
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