Social platforms – especially Twitter – are easily exposed to the phenomenon of misinformation as they are, by their very nature, open to interaction with everyone.
As part of the project, in order to assess the pervasiveness and spread of the disinformation phenomenon, the Italian-language stream of the social platform Twitter was monitored for a whole year. In particular, the entire stream of tweets in Italian was extracted using a set of filters and connectors applied to the entire stream delivered by Twitter.
The data collected were used to carry out research activities dedicated to the fully automatic classification of topics of interest on the platform, the massive clustering of topics and communities of interest and, finally, the definition of technologies and methodologies capable of identifying and quantifying the phenomenon of disinformation.
It was thus possible to draw an up-to-date and reliable picture of the health of social communication in Italy and to characterise the phenomenon of disinformation in its entirety by identifying sub-networks of disinformation and their volume of social interaction.