# The Impact of Disinformation on a Controversial Debate on Social Media

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.15968 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15968/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 30 Jun 2021.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Studying Fake News Spreading, Polarisation Dynamics, and Manipulation by Bots: a Tale of Networks and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07909/) (2021)
- [Writing about COVID-19 vaccines: Emotional profiling unravels how mainstream and alternative press framed AstraZeneca, Pfizer and vaccination campaigns](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.07538/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this work we study how pervasive is the presence of disinformation in the Italian debate around immigration on Twitter and the role of automated accounts in the diffusion of such content. By characterising the Twitter users with an textitUntrustworthiness score, that tells us how frequently they engage with disinformation content, we are able to see that such bad information consumption habits are not equally distributed across the users; adopting a network analysis approach, we can identify communities characterised by a very high presence of users that frequently share content from unreliable news sources. Within this context, social bots tend to inject in the network more malicious content, that often remains confined in a limited number of clusters; instead, they target reliable content in order to diversify their reach. The evidence we gather suggests that, at least in this particular case study, there is a strong interplay between social bots and users engaging with unreliable content, influencing the diffusion of the latter across the network.