Digital Methods to Study (and Reduce) the Impact of Disinformation

Social media have democratized communication but have led to the explosion of the so-called "fake news" phenomenon. This problem has visible implications on global security, both political (e.g.the QANON case) and health ( anti-Covid vaccination and No-Vax fake news). Models that detect the problem in real time and on large amounts of data are needed. Digital methods and text classification procedures are able to do this through predictive approaches to identify a suspect message or author. This paper aims to apply a supervised model to the study of fake news on the Twittersphere to highlight its potential and preliminary limitations. The case study is the infodemic generated on social media during the first phase of the COVID-19 emergency. The application of the supervised model involved the use of a training and testing dataset. The different preliminary steps to build the training dataset are also shown, highlighting, with a critical approach, the challenges of working with supervised algorithms. Two aspects emerge. The first is that it is important to block the sources of bad information, before the information itself. The second is that algorithms could be sources of bias. Social media companies need to be very careful about relying on automated classificatio

Percezione del rischio vulcanico e contesti socio-relazionali. Il percorso di ricerca e formazione PRisVes con gli studenti del territorio vesuviano

Il lavoro oggetto dell’elaborato di tesi è un ampio progetto di ricerca sviluppato su tre interventi nell’arco di quasi tre anni e che ha come destinatari gli studenti (n=378) di 5 istituti scolastici vesuviani di secondaria di I grado. L’obiettivo è stato realizzare attraverso modalità partecipative con docenti e studenti un percorso formativo sul rischio Vesuvio, e in un secondo momento valutarne l’impatto su atteggiamenti, percezione e comportamenti dei ragazzi riguardo il rischio vulcanico. Pertanto, il modello seguito è quello della ricerca quasi-sperimentale, con due gruppi di classi, sperimentali e di controllo, e due rilevazioni, prima-dopo. Gli interventi hanno previsto una fase esplorativa, una formativa e infine una valutativa. Ciascuna fase è stata strutturata con obiettivi, metodi e, naturalmente, contenuti differenti. La fase esplorativa è stata gestita attraverso due tecniche di raccolta dati: il focus group e l’indagine campionaria. L’obiettivo era un primo approccio con i giovani adolescenti sia per meglio costruire il questionario, sia per rilevare i bisogni informativi degli studenti riguardo il rischio vulcanico dell’ambiente in cui vivono. Quest’ultimo aspetto ci ha consentito di ricavare dei moduli didattici, su cui è stato implementato il percorso educativo, unico per tutte le scuole coinvolte. La fase formativa, durata quasi 3 mesi, è stata gestita dai docenti delle classi sperimentali, ed ha riguardato un breve percorso didattico sull’ambiente e sui rischi vulcanici, condotto sui moduli ricavati nella prima fase. Il ruolo del sottoscritto, durante questa fase, si è limitato al monitoraggio costante delle attività con lo scopo di assicurare, quanto più possibile, che il percorso educativo fosse omogeneo per tutte le classi. La fase valutativa, identificabile con l’indagine quasi-sperimentale, ha previsto una rilevazione pre-intervento didattico ed una post-intervento sui due gruppi di studenti, sperimentali e di controllo. Questa fase ci ha permesso di rilevare gli esiti del percorso formativo, su percezione, atteggiamenti e comportamenti rilevati sui soggetti. L’ANOVA sulle differenze pre e post trattamento tra i due gruppi ha evidenziato ricadute positive dell’intervento sulla conoscenza dell’ambiente vulcanico e delle misure protettive (p<.05). Per quanto riguarda l’adozione di comportamenti protettivi, non risulta significativa la differenza nel post tra i due gruppi (p=.453) ma, è possibile registrare complessivamente un incremento significativo per entrambi i gruppi (p<01). Infine, l’intervento ha avuto esiti significativi anche sulle dimensioni percettive. Sugli studenti partecipanti, infatti, sono stati registrati nel posttest livelli significativamente più elevati di percezione del rischio (p<.1), autoefficacia (p<.01) e fiducia verso le autorità (p<.1

Russian-Ukraine war and institutional use of memetic communication: methodological opportunities and challenges

The paper aims to explore the contents conveyed by internet memes (IM) in relation to the Russia-Ukraine conflict, analysing their ability to widely spread the message through forms of communication including irony, satire and denigration. The analysis of memes raises important epistemological and methodological challenges ranging from data collection to automatic or semi-automatic analysis techniques

A Mixed Content Analysis Design in the Study of the Italian Perception of Covid-19 on Twitter

The digital era and the boom of social, user-generated and freely available and usable content on the Net has brought to the fore a classic technique, accused too often of being highly subjective and requiring a large amount of intellectual work. This technique is Content Analysis, which has seen an unprecedented explosion in recent years. In addition to the incessant flow, speed of diffusion and high volume of today’s big data, the attention of social researchers –as well as of anyone interested in drawing information from this enormous proliferation of data –is shifting towards new possibilities. Among these we find that of having a notion of the contents conveyed, of the feelings expressed, of the polarities of big data, but also the chance to extract other information that indirectly speaks of the tastes, opinions, beliefs and transformations behind the behavior of the users of the Net. In fact, secondary data available on the Net, collectable through sophisticated query systems with API or with web scraping software, make it possible to accumulate huge amounts of this dense social data, from which it is possible to try to extract not only trends but real knowledge, in a quantitative as well as in a qualitative manner. This enriches the value of the results that can be produced with Content Analysis and limits, until disappearing, all the critical horizons that have classically left this technique in the shadows, allowing it to find new applicative dignity, validity and reliability (Hamad et al. 2016). Inorder to explain this evidence, the contribution that we will present attempts to prove that the return of Content Analysis techniques is not only due to the change in the scenario and in the data analyzed, but also to the ability of this technique to innovate and evolve, leading to open analytical perspectives beyond contingent changes. This can be demonstrated through the application of digital mixed content analysis to the recent Covid-19 outbreak and its development of the perception of the Italian population on a specific digital social platform, Twitter

Digital politics and voting geography. Potential connections between online storytelling and electoral results in the Campania regional elections

Digital political communication has undergone a revolution due to the emergence of new digital media platforms, significantly impacting electoral campaigns. However, there remains limited understanding of the implications of digital communication in local elections and its correlation with territorial vote concentration. The objective of this study is to investigate these relationships during the 2020 regional elections in Campania. Specifically, the focus is on four candidate profiles from the outgoing president’s political list. The employed methodology follows a quantita- tive approach, entailing a secondary analysis of an extensive dataset encompassing the candi- dates’ digital profiles and electoral outcomes within the Naples district. The digital content from their public Facebook pages is extracted using Api strategies, encompassing textual aspects, language style, political communication sentiment, and follower engagement. Through spatial analysis of the candidates’ obtained votes, potential relationships between the geographical distribution of votes and candidates’ digital activity are identified and summarized using the Digital activity index. The findings suggest promising avenues for future research concerning the evolution of political communication in the digital era and its interplay with electoral outcomes

Platformization hate. Patterns and algorithmic bias of verbal violence on social media

The paper presented is an analysis of the Hate Speech of tweets during the implementation of the EU's Digital Covid Certificate policy. The work starts from the assumption that Hate Speech is an often "submerged" phenomenon because it also includes some forms recognized as "incivility." Therefore, there are two research questions: the first asks what are the new categories of "hate" that emerge in the EU Digital Covid Certificate policy debate, while the second questions the methodological implications on the use of algorithms in detecting the phenomenon. The results we arrived at are, from a substantive point of view, of good interest because they show us how it is possible to witness a new kind of online hatred. However, the disagreements we encountered in constructing an unambiguous definition of HS for the supervised algorithm leave open many questions. Among them is the fact that the differences between HS, incivility, and even freedom of expression can be very small. In the context of large social platforms, where the criteria of the algorithm are not always explicit and are also the policies of the platform, this could be a proble

Follow the Geographic Information: The Challenges of Spatial Analysis in Digital Methods

In the digital environment, defined as aspace with no anchors (Menduni2014), the spatial dimension may have a significant role, mostly in relation totheInternet or digital studies. Social Media Geographic Information (Campagna et al.2016),even if limited, can be highly useful to overcome some limitations of social media analysis and user generated content. With theobjective to report the potential and limits of this approach, in this articlea case study will be presentedon the individual perception related to COVID-19 in Italy. Starting from the analysis of ecological dataand the social media data, we reproduce threemeasuresby exploring three different elements that could be anchored to a geographical dimension: the storytelling of COVID(COVID-Issues), the spread of infection (COVID-Spread), and the distribution of measures (COVID-Measures) to understand the regional trends of the second wave of the pandemic emergencethat represent the timespanof this contribution

The Vaccine Is Now Here. The State-Regions Governance Between Converging Plans and Diverging Digital Communication

This article aims to present an analysis of State-Regional governance in relation to the Italian vaccination campaign, with the objective of identifying possible elements of divergence and convergence on three points. The first refers to the regulatory dimension of the campaign, which ensures the management plans of the national campaign and individual regional plans. The second relates to the implementation area of the provisions concerning data on allocation and distribution of both vaccines and vaccinated people. The third, instead, concerns the institutional communication of vaccines on Facebook institutional profiles. It introduces an analysis of public communication on the anti-Covid-19 vaccine, from December 20, 2020 (a few days before the start of the campaign) to June 30, 2021, six months after in a moment in which the numbers of contagions were beginning to show a definite containment. It examines the central level of communication, i.e., the communication campaign of government actors, and the regional level, i.e., the institutional communication of regional Governorss through their respective social profiles. Facebook posts were extracted via API programs and analyzed by a quantitative content analysis. The results show an institutional scenario that goes in two directions. In opposition to a normative and implementation level that is more coherent and less divergent, there is an extremely fragmented communication context with elements of contradiction between State and Regions. The latter would respond to primarily political logic (at disagreement with the governing coalition) to claim intervention priorities and-in implementation-to change the local territorial allocation of vaccines. The communication dimension thus turns out to be a very relevant component of vaccination governance mechanisms: not decisive for the actual implementation of the campaign, but very functional for the creation of new storytelling and thus likely political consensus

Mappare il racconto, raccontare l’emergenza. Voci digitali dai territori.

Related to the first period of the COVID-19 pandemic (March-June 2020), some recent studies on the application of content analysis of geolocalized tweets (Bashar et alii 2020, Punziano et alii 2020) have demonstrated the nega-tive relation between the Coronavirus spread (with Northern Italy most affected) and the polarity of social narratives about the pandemic. In brief, the «resilient» social narrative of the most impacted regions has corresponded to a negative and worried emergency narrative of the less affected regions. In relation to epidemio-logical data, the second phase of the pandemic (also referred to as the «second wave», in autumn 2020) has been very different from the first (ISSa 2020). The severity of emergency, without considering questions about the reliability of the first wave data (Istat 2020a), has been more relevant and homogeneous across Italy. The study questions whether there are differences between the geography of contagion and that of the narrative. Given the increasingly homogeneous spread of the virus, the assumption has been that the digital arena also has ended up show-ing a narrative more united on negative sentiments. The issue is addressed by ana-lyzing a corpus of geolocalized tweets, extracted in the period from the new Octo-ber lockdown to the partial and fragmented pre-Christmas reopenings in 2020. Following the application of a model combining text mining and GIS analysis, the most recurrent themes in social discourse on Tw i t t e r were mapped. This geography of emerging social narratives (COVID-Issues) compared with the geography of contagion spread (COVID-Spread) and the norms (COVID-Measures) allowed to detect the trend in the relationship of these three dimensions during the second emergence from COVID-19

La produzione scientifica italiana attaverso un'analisi degli articoli pubblicati sulle riviste infermieristiche: 2003-2009

RIASSUNTOIl presente articolo analizza la produzione scientifica italiana attraverso una fotografia delle pubblicazioni infermieristiche su 5 riviste nazionali nel periodo tra il 2003 e 2009.Questo è il terzo articolo di un lavoro iniziato nel1978 e che ha visto due pubblicazioni nel 2005. Il lavoro ha l'intento di monitorare nel tempo la produzione bibliografica italiana per quanto attiene 5 Riviste di settore. Gli articoli sono stati catalogati in base a criteri predefiniti con lo scopo di verificare lo status dell'avanzamento dei lavori di ricerca e di sviluppo teorico. I risultati ottenuti dimostrano che, nonostante ci sia un incremento delle pubblicazioni che applicano metodi di ricerca, queste rimangono comunque al di sotto della tendenza internazionale e che, in ambito nazionale, si prediligono ancora argomenti quali piani assistenziali, normative ed organizzazione del lavoro invece che ricerca o evidenze scientifiche. Da un lato si tende a sensibilizzare il mondo infermieristico per essere al passo con i tempi e con il dibattito internazionale, dall'altro si registra la mancanza di adeguati strumenti per la conoscenza ed investimenti specifici nella ricerca, Il risultato è di limitare fortemente l'aggiornamento continuo scientifico nelle diverse generazioni di professionisti e la partecipazione per la generalizzazione delle stesse. Altro risultato che può essere interpretato anche come una conseguenza, è relativo alla scarsa produzione nella letteratura italiana presa in considerazione, di Modelli Concettuali e Teorie. Modelli e Teorie che costituiscono e contribuiscono al sapere specifico di una disciplina e che si pongono quali strumenti necessari per creare un sapere e di conseguenza una immagine delle scienze infermieristiche diversa da quella di esclusiva scienza applicata. Parole Chiave: articoli scientifici, riviste italiane, immagine infermieristica, ricerca infermieristica ABSTRACTThis study investigates the number of articles published by Italian nursing journals by analyzing five Italian journals between 2003 and 2009. This is the third part of a study started in 1978, two articles were already published in 2005. The work is aimed at monitoring the number of nursing articles published. The articles were cataloged according to predefined criteria with the main aim to verify the status of the progress of research and theoretical development among Italian nurses. Results show that, although there is an increase in publications which apply research methods, these are still below the international trend and that, at national level, nurses prefer topics such as care plans, regulations and organization of work rather than research or scientific evidence. On the one hand there is a raise on Italian nurses of interest in wider topic in order to be closer to the international debate, on the other hand there is a lack of adequate tools to improve knowledge and specific investments in research. As result of this there is a strong limitation in the knowledge growth of Italian nurses together with a lack of participation among and for different generations of nurses. In addition to the above it has been enucleated a scarcity within the literature analyzed of development of theoretical models, theories and concepts. Conversely theoretical models, theories and concepts are important pillars of scientific knowledge and they have a strong role in professional development, moreover these are necessary in order to set and improve nursing and nurses image nowadays far from the exclusive applied science. Key words: scientific articles, italian journal, nursing image, nursing researc