TY - GEN
T1 - Twitter Bots Influence on the Russo-Ukrainian War During the 2022 Italian General Elections
AU - De Faveri, Francesco Luigi
AU - Cosuti, Luca
AU - Tricomi, Pier Paolo
AU - Conti, Mauro
PY - 2023
Y1 - 2023
N2 - In February 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. This event had global repercussions, especially on the political decisions of European countries. As expected, the role of Italy in the conflict became a major campaign issue for the Italian General Election held on 25 September 2022. Politicians frequently use Twitter to communicate during political campaigns, but bots often interfere and attempt to manipulate elections. Hence, understanding whether bots influenced public opinion regarding the conflict and, therefore, the elections is essential. In this work, we investigate how Italian politics responded to the Russo-Ukrainian conflict on Twitter and whether bots manipulated public opinion before the 2022 general election. We first analyze 39,611 tweet of six major political Italian parties to understand how they discussed the war during the period February-December 2022. Then, we focus on the 360,823 comments under the last month’s posts before the elections, discovering around 12% of the commenters are bots. By examining their activities, it becomes clear they both distorted how war topics were treated and influenced real users during the last month before the elections.
AB - In February 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. This event had global repercussions, especially on the political decisions of European countries. As expected, the role of Italy in the conflict became a major campaign issue for the Italian General Election held on 25 September 2022. Politicians frequently use Twitter to communicate during political campaigns, but bots often interfere and attempt to manipulate elections. Hence, understanding whether bots influenced public opinion regarding the conflict and, therefore, the elections is essential. In this work, we investigate how Italian politics responded to the Russo-Ukrainian conflict on Twitter and whether bots manipulated public opinion before the 2022 general election. We first analyze 39,611 tweet of six major political Italian parties to understand how they discussed the war during the period February-December 2022. Then, we focus on the 360,823 comments under the last month’s posts before the elections, discovering around 12% of the commenters are bots. By examining their activities, it becomes clear they both distorted how war topics were treated and influenced real users during the last month before the elections.
KW - Bots Detection
KW - Bots Influence
KW - Italian Political Elections
KW - Russia
KW - Russo-Ukrainian War
KW - Social Network Analysis
KW - Twitter
KW - Ukraine
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85172185174&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/978-981-99-5177-2_3
DO - 10.1007/978-981-99-5177-2_3
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85172185174
SN - 9789819951765
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
SP - 38
EP - 57
BT - Security and Privacy in Social Networks and Big Data - 9th International Symposium, SocialSec 2023, Proceedings
A2 - Arief, Budi
A2 - Li, Shujun
A2 - Monreale, Anna
A2 - Sirivianos, Michael
PB - Springer
T2 - Security and Privacy in Social Networks and Big Data - 9th International Symposium, SocialSec 2023, Proceedings
Y2 - 14 August 2023 through 16 August 2023
ER -
