Online Social Networks (OSNs) allow personalities and companies to communicate directly with the public, bypassing filters of traditional medias. As people rely on OSNs to stay up-to-date, the political debate has moved online too. We witness the sudden explosion of harsh political debates and the dissemination of rumours in OSNs. Identifying such behaviour requires a deep understaning on how people interact via OSNs during political debates. We present a preliminary study of interactions in a popular OSN, namely Instagram. We take Italy as a case study in the period before the 2019 European Elections. We observe the activity of top Italian Instagram profiles in different categories: politics, music, sport and show. We record their posts for more than two months, tracking "likes'' and comments from users. Results suggest that profiles of politicians attract markedly different interactions than other categories. People tend to comment more, with longer comments, debating for longer time, with a large number of replies, most of which are not explicitly solicited. Moreover, comments tend to come from a small group of very active users. Finally, we witness substantial differences when comparing profiles of different parties.

Towards Understanding Political Interactions on Instagram

Drago, Idilio;
2019-01-01

Abstract

Online Social Networks (OSNs) allow personalities and companies to communicate directly with the public, bypassing filters of traditional medias. As people rely on OSNs to stay up-to-date, the political debate has moved online too. We witness the sudden explosion of harsh political debates and the dissemination of rumours in OSNs. Identifying such behaviour requires a deep understaning on how people interact via OSNs during political debates. We present a preliminary study of interactions in a popular OSN, namely Instagram. We take Italy as a case study in the period before the 2019 European Elections. We observe the activity of top Italian Instagram profiles in different categories: politics, music, sport and show. We record their posts for more than two months, tracking "likes'' and comments from users. Results suggest that profiles of politicians attract markedly different interactions than other categories. People tend to comment more, with longer comments, debating for longer time, with a large number of replies, most of which are not explicitly solicited. Moreover, comments tend to come from a small group of very active users. Finally, we witness substantial differences when comparing profiles of different parties.
2019
30th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media
Hof, Germany
September 17 - 20, 2019
Proceedings of the 30th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media
ACM
247
251
9781450368858
https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3343657
Instagram; User behaviour; Online social networks; Politics
Trevisan, Martino; Vassio, Luca; Drago, Idilio; Mellia, Marco; MURAI FERREIRA, FABRICIO; DINIZ DE FIGUEIREDO, FLAVIO VINICIUS; Couto da Silva, Ana Pau...espandi
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/2318/1767124
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