Facebook digital traces for survey research: Assessing the efficiency and effectiveness of a Facebook ad–based procedure for recruiting online survey respondents in niche and difficult-to-reach populations

Survey-based studies are increasingly experimenting with strategies that employ digital footprints left by users on social media as entry points for recruiting participants and complementary data sources. In this perspective, the Facebook advertising platform provides unique opportunities and challenges through its marketing tools that target advertisements based on users’ demographics, behaviors, and interests. This article presents a procedure that employed the most recent developments in Facebook marketing tools to evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of an innovative method for recruiting niche and traditionally hard-to-reach respondents. Although the multiple innovations introduced in the method hinder a proper comparison with previous studies, the survey provides evidence concerning the efficacy of the procedure and offers scholars a set of implementations to design future comparable Facebook ad–based surveys. Challenges, opportunities, and results for effectiveness are discussed in light of a previous survey on Italian adults carried out with a panel-based computer-assisted web interviewing method

Multi-Party Media Partisanship Attention Score. Estimating Partisan Attention of News Media Sources Using Twitter Data in the Lead-up to 2018 Italian Election

The ongoing radical transformations in communication ecosystems have brought up concerns about the risks of partisan selective exposure and ideological polarization. Tra- ditionally, partisan selective exposure is measured by cross-tabulating survey responses to questions on vote intentions and media consumption. This process is expensive, limits the number of news outlets taken into account and is prone to the typical biases of self-reported data. Building upon previous works and with a specific focus on the online media environment, we introduce a new method to measure partisan media attention in a multi-party political system using Twitter data from 2018 Italian general election. Our first research question addresses the effectiveness of this method by measuring the extent to which our estimates correlate with partisan newspaper consumption measured by the latest Italian National Election Studies (ITANES) survey. Once established the reliability of our method, we employ these scores and measures to analyze the Italian digital media ecosystem in the lead-up to March 2018 election. The traditionally high level of political parallelism that characterizes both the Italian press and TV sectors is only partially reflected in a digital media ecosystem where partisan news sources seem to coexist with cross-partisan outlets. Results also point out that certain online partisan communities tend to rely more on exclusive news media sources

It takes a village to manipulate the media: coordinated link sharing behavior during 2018 and 2019 Italian elections.

Over the last few years, a proliferation of attempts to define, understand and fight the spread of problematic information in contemporary media ecosystems emerged. Most of these attempts focus on false content and/or bad actors detection. In this paper, we argue for a wider ecological focus. Using the frame of media manipulation and a revised version of the ‘coordinated inauthentic behavior’ original definition, the paper presents a study based on an unprecedented combination of Facebook data, accessed through the CrowdTangle API, and two datasets of Italian political news stories published in the run-up to the 2018 Italian general election and 2019 European election. By focusing on actors’ collective behavior, we identified several networks of pages, groups, and verified public profiles (‘entities’), that shared the same political news articles on Facebook within a very short period of time. Some entities in our networks were openly political, while others, despite sharing political content too, deceptively presented themselves as entertainment venues. The proportion of inauthentic entities in a network affects the wideness of the range of news media sources they shared, thus pointing to different strategies and possible motivations. The paper has both theoretical and empirical implications: it frames the concept of ‘coordinated inauthentic behavior’ in existing literature, introduces a method to detect coordinated link sharing behavior and points out different strategies and methods employed by networks of actors willing to manipulate the media and public opinion

Networked Intimacy. Intimacy and Friendship among Italian Facebook users

In this paper, we describe the results of a qualitative study conducted with 120 Italian Facebook users to investigate how Facebook enables people to achieve a mutually constitutive intimacy with their own friendship network: a negotiation of intimacy in public through self-disclosure, where the affordances of the platform are useful to elicit significant reactions, validations and demonstrations of affection from others. We observed that, in order to achieve various levels of intimacy on Facebook, people engage in various strategies: Showing rather than telling, Sharing implicit content, Tagging, Expectation of mutual understanding and Liking. These strategies produce a collaborative disclosure that relies on others’ cooperation to maintain the boundaries between private and public space. Based on these premises, we developed a framework of collaborative strategies for managing public intimacy that both systematizes and extends the findings identified in previous studies of intimacy on Facebook. We describe this framework as networked intimacy and we discuss the consequences of it in the light of already existing research on online self-disclosure

Understanding Engagement and Willingness to Speak Up in Social Television: A Full-Season, Cross-Genre Analysis of TV Audience Participation on Twitter

The widespread use of digital platforms has changed the way people watch television. Despite an abundance of empirical studies, full-season, cross-genre analyses of different TV formats are rare. Based on a data set of 1,383,414 tweets, this study aims to close this gap by comparing Twitter commentaries around the 2012–2013 seasons of the Italian edition of The X Factor and the political talk show Servizio Pubblico. For each episode, we identify peaks of Twitter engagement and analyze the corresponding TV scene, revealing the role played by suspense and surprise in catalyzing the engagement of online audiences. A content analysis of 12,640 tweets created during peaks of engagement reveals how willingness to speak up varies when the topic is politics rather than entertainment

‘Fake news’ is the invention of a liar: How false information circulates within the hybrid news system

Alarmed by the oversimplifications related to the ‘fake news’ buzzword, researchers have started to unpack the concept, defining diverse types and forms of misleading news. Most of the existing works in the area consider crucial the intent of the content creator in order to differentiate among different types of problematic information. This article argues for a change of perspective that, by leveraging the conceptual framework of sociocybernetics, shifts from exclusive attention to creators of misleading information to a broader approach that focuses on propagators and, as a result, on the dynamics of the propagation processes. The analytical implications of this perspective are discussed at a micro level (criteria to judge the falsehood of news and to decide to spread it), at a meso level (four possible relations between individual judgements and decisions), and at a macro level (global circulation cascades). The authors apply this theoretical gaze to analyse ‘fake news’ stories that challenge existing models

A population of gamma-ray emitting globular clusters seen with the Fermi Large Area Telescope

Globular clusters with their large populations of millisecond pulsars (MSPs) are believed to be potential emitters of high-energy gamma-ray emission. Our goal is to constrain the millisecond pulsar populations in globular clusters from analysis of gamma-ray observations. We use 546 days of continuous sky-survey observations obtained with the Large Area Telescope aboard the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope to study the gamma-ray emission towards 13 globular clusters. Steady point-like high-energy gamma-ray emission has been significantly detected towards 8 globular clusters. Five of them (47 Tucanae, Omega Cen, NGC 6388, Terzan 5, and M 28) show hard spectral power indices $(0.7 < \Gamma <1.4)$ and clear evidence for an exponential cut-off in the range 1.0-2.6 GeV, which is the characteristic signature of magnetospheric emission from MSPs. Three of them (M 62, NGC 6440 and NGC 6652) also show hard spectral indices $(1.0 < \Gamma < 1.7)$, however the presence of an exponential cut-off can not be unambiguously established. Three of them (Omega Cen, NGC 6388, NGC 6652) have no known radio or X-ray MSPs yet still exhibit MSP spectral properties. From the observed gamma-ray luminosities, we estimate the total number of MSPs that is expected to be present in these globular clusters. We show that our estimates of the MSP population correlate with the stellar encounter rate and we estimate 2600-4700 MSPs in Galactic globular clusters, commensurate with previous estimates. The observation of high-energy gamma-ray emission from a globular cluster thus provides a reliable independent method to assess their millisecond pulsar populations that can be used to make constraints on the original neutron star X-ray binary population, essential for understanding the importance of binary systems in slowing the inevitable core collapse of globular clusters.Comment: Accepted for publication in A&A. Corresponding authors: J. Kn\"odlseder, N. Webb, B. Pancraz