It has just been published on Information, Communication & Society “Diverging patterns of interaction around news on social media: insularity and partisanship during the 2018 Italian election campaign”.

I co-authored this paper with Fabio Giglietto, Augusto Valeriani and Giada Marino, devoting most of my attention to the methodological and statistical analyses sections.

The study – an outcome of the Mapping Italian News project – sheds light on the Italian online news media ecosystem and digital behaviour of partisan communities using methods we described in a recently published paper that usefully exploit and mix Twitter with Facebook data.

We found that:

1. On Twitter, sources mainly shared by supporters of populist parties (the Five Star Movement and the League) are characterized by higher levels of insularity compared to those shared by supporters of other parties.
2. On Facebook, news items published by highly insular sources receive a higher number of shares per comment.
3. News stories presenting a positive framing of the ‘cyber party’ Five Star Movement received a higher number of shares per comment compared to items presenting the Movement in a negative light, while the opposite is true for stories on all other political parties (see the figure below).

You can read the full paper here.