Twitter

Italy is facing dark days because of coronavirus and there is a lot of disinformation about this topic, especially on messaging apps and social networks (the journalist Jane Lytvynenko is collecting and debunking a large number of fake news about COVID-19). Last week (03/12) China sent a team of doctors and equipment for Italian hospitals, a part of which Italy will pay for. The Chinese Embassy in Italy reported the news on Twitter and – during these particular days – their Twitter account is particular active....

Some days ago the journalist Charlotte Godart contacted me and asked me to explain how to use my script tweet_analysis.py. Her goal was to convert Twitter datasets about Chinese propaganda into graphs, so that people can see how the Chinese government operates on Twitter to influence their opinion. While helping her I had the possibility to take a look at these datasets and they are intriguing, very different from the Internet Research Agency dataset....

This is the third and last post about the Internet Research Agency dataset, which was shared by Twitter in October 2018. In Part II I have focused on the European situation – especially in Germany, Italy, France and Spain – to understand if the Russian government might have tried to spread disinformation as it did in the US. In this post I want to focus on Italy and answer to the question: has the Internet Research Agency tried to manipulate information in Italy?...

In this post I will move forward on the analysis of Twitter datasets, that I have started in December. You can read the previous post, “About Iran and IRA Twitter datasets (for fun) – Part I”. This time I have focused on the potential Russian propaganda in Europe, so I have decided to analyse the tweets written in German, Italian, Spanish, French, Dutch and Danish. I have left out English tweets because it would have been difficult to separate the propaganda in the United Kingdom from the propaganda in the United States....

On 17 October 2018 Twitter released two datasets about the propaganda accounts of the Internet Research Agency (IRA) and Iran. Each dataset has three parts: a CSV file with the user list, a CSV file with all* the tweets of said users and a dataset of the shared images and memes. For fun I tried to use pandas and matplotlib to read the data. To read the file ira_tweets_csv_hashed.csv (5,4 GB) I split it into 91 parts, with 100....