Abstract
The advent of social media changed the way we consume content, favoring a disintermediated access to, and production of information. This scenario has been matter of critical discussion about its impact on society, magnified in the case of the Arab Springs or heavily criticized during Brexit and the 2016 U.S. elections. In this work we explore information consumption on Twitter during the 2019 European Parliament electoral campaign by analyzing the interaction patterns of official news outlets, disinformation outlets, politicians, people from the showbiz and many others. We extensively explore interactions among different classes of accounts in the months preceding the elections, held between 23rd and 26th of May, 2019. We collected almost 400,000 tweets posted by 863 accounts having different roles in the public society. Through a thorough quantitative analysis we investigate the information flow among them, also exploiting geolocalized information. Accounts show the tendency to confine their interaction within the same class and the debate rarely crosses national borders. Moreover, we do not find evidence of an organized network of accounts aimed at spreading disinformation. Instead, disinformation outlets are largely ignored by the other actors and hence play a peripheral role in online political discussions.
Highlights
The wide diffusion of online social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter raised concerns about the quality of the information accessed by users and about the way in which users interact with each other [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]
Our rich interaction network is representative of the information flow across different actors, including disinformation outlets, and several countries involved in the 2019 European Parliament elections
We analyzed the interactions of several accounts belonging to different figures of the public society in the context of the 2019 European Parliament elections
Summary
The wide diffusion of online social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter raised concerns about the quality of the information accessed by users and about the way in which users interact with each other [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]. The chairman of Twitter announced that political advertisements will be banned from Twitter soon, claiming that our democratic system are not prepared to deal with the negative consequences brought by the power and influence of online advertising campaigns [9]. In this context, a wide body of scientific literature focused on the influence and on the impact of disinformation and automation (i.e., social bots) on political elections [10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18]. In [11] is highlighted that fake news consumption is limited to a very small fraction of users with well defined characteristics
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