Social Media in 2013 Italian Election – IR14

Our presentation at Internet Research 14.0 | resistance + appropriation

In February 2013, over 35 million Italian citizens voted to renew the national parliament and Internet played an important and perhaps decisive role. From the 1st of January to 24 of February we collected data from all official Facebook and Twitter profiles of the presidential candidates. During the same period we also collected the average of political polls for coalitions and the mentions of the same group of candidates in online news media, forum, blog, Twitter and Facebook. We identified the key moments of the campaign and we manually coded the interactions on the social media profiles of the candidates with the aim of understanding the relationship between polls and social media interactions. We will therefore presents an overview on how candidates and their networked publics used social media profiles during the campaign, a general method aimed at identifying key moment in a political campaign using data from the Internet and the qualitative analysis of social media interactions during the identified key moments.

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The Genesis of Crisis Communication in Twitter: from Witnesses to Gatewatchers – IR14

Our presentation at Internet Research 14.0 | resistance + appropriation

During crisis events individuals look for information and try to share useful content or testify their own experience through social media. The research for valuable information is, relies largely on information provided by news agencies and official actors. This collective behavior leads, on a given amount of time, toward the emergence of gatewatching activities where digital media are used to reshare and to control information. This paper will investigate how this phenomenon emerge looking at the Twitter conversations produced during the first five hours after the earthquake that struck Emilia Romagna region in Italy on May 20th 2012. We have been able to detect, in the early user-led phase of the phenomenon, what kind of messages were produced and how user-produced communication results in different network structures.