EU Disinfo Lab Disinformation Detection System: 2018 Italian Elections

EU DisinfoLab

Disinformation detection system: 2018 Italian elections Case report

Authors : Alaphilippe, Alexandre Ceccarelli, Chiara Charlet, LĂŠa Mycielski, Martin First published: 01/06/2018 in Brussels Project funded by Open Society Foundations

Table of contents Table of contents .................................................................................................................................... 1 Introduction ............................................................................................................................................ 2 Methodology........................................................................................................................................... 3 Results ..................................................................................................................................................... 4 Notable cases .......................................................................................................................................... 7 January 21st, 2018: “Bus & Wi-Fi for migrants” case ......................................................................... 7 January 24th: Migrants beating a man in Rome ................................................................................. 9 February 13th, 2018 – The Trenitalia case........................................................................................ 11 February 18th: Dagospia video: A doctored video on migrants ....................................................... 13 March 3rd, 2018: #SorosLega5Stelle ................................................................................................ 15 March 4th, 2018 – 500000 ballot sheets .......................................................................................... 18

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Introduction The role that so-called “fake news” played in the public debate during the 2016 US election period has drawn researchers’ attention to this phenomenon, mainly concerning its impact on the democratic electoral process. Naturally, the approaches differed depending on the research field of the various researchers and the entry point to the problem.

The issue was first addressed at the micro level, using numerous examples of disinformation.

For instance, the Donbass conflict in Ukraine exemplifies how information warfare can exploit multiple media to spread propaganda in conflict zones, especially through Russian state TV. The 2016 United States presidential elections showed the importance of social media in fake news dissemination during the campaign period, while also highlighting the difficulty to provide accurate assessment of its impact on the electoral process. Even in the so-called “swing states” - states that played a deciding role in the result of the elections - where misinformation and fake news was most shared, an impact assessment has been difficult to produce.

Still, the majority of academic work focuses on a macro-level analysis. We can identify three major approaches: The first approach takes into account the role of echo chambers - questioning the behaviour of the media sphere and their influence in creating partisanship echo chambers. For instance, the role of misinformation content in generating homogenous and polarised echo chambers, as well as the role of confirmation bias, have been demonstrated on Facebook. The influence of recently created alt-right media in the Republican partisanship echo chambers in the US has also been analysed, with Democrat echo chambers relying more on mainstream media and traditional networks like CNN. Secondly, we noticed the emergence of research on “computational propaganda”, which relates to artificial amplification of false narratives. The role of automated or semi-automated accounts (bots) in amplifying false narratives has been demonstrated especially during the US elections and the Brexit referendum.

Finally, research on “fake news” detection, combining content analysis with network analysis through the use of semantic tools and machine learning, which highlighted the necessity to have a combined machine/human approach and to fuse techniques to assess veracity of information. Note that instead of the buzz term "fake news", we favour the scientific concept of "disinformation", defined as “content deliberately created with the intent to disrupt electoral processes”. In our context, we postulated that the content is amplified by social media.

We position ourselves in this third area of research, focusing on identifying the actors and communities susceptible to disinformation and comparing them to the actors and communities actually spreading it.

Indeed, during the 2017 French elections, EU DisinfoLab conducted a pilot project on disinformation spreading on social media. Studying the false information spreading, we have tried to confirm or disprove the theory that there was a Russian influence on the electoral process. To do that, our approach was firstly to identify the disinformation network by analysing the spread of 11 top disinformation pieces during the French election. Next, we compared it to a “pro-Russian” ecosystem, gathering 5000 most active accounts relaying Sputnik or Russia Today content.

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Our results showed 75% of correlation between the Russian ecosystem and the ecosystem of people that spread 3 disinformation pieces during the elections. For people that have spread 5 different pieces of disinformation, the correlation went up to 92%, showing high correlation between the two networks.

Building this correlation matrix enabled faster reactivity in a disinformation crisis. The two tweets from Nicolas Vanderbiest during the “Macron Leaks” (alleged email leak from Emmanuel Macron's team combined with a high amount of disinformation) and the “Bahamas rumour” (disinformation that Emmanuel Macron has a secret account in the Bahamas), exposing the network and the correlation, reached 802.564 impressions and 99.135 engagements. This communication’s effectiveness stemmed not from the disinformation having been fact-checked, but having been “sourced”, which, according to our definition, serves “to expose the origin of the information in order to instil in the audience reasonable doubt as to its veracity”.

Following these promising results, we wanted to test the reversal of the methodology. If we were able to find a correlation between disinformation spreading and the Russian ecosystem, would it work to firstly monitor the Russian ecosystem in order to detect disinformation in real time? Furthermore, we wanted to test if this monitoring technique would contribute to raising awareness amongst the population about the potential issue.

Methodology Before starting our research, we determined a series Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to measure the results of our work: -

The number of pieces of potential disinformation sourced: Having identified the correct ecosystem, we could then proceed to identifying a significant number of pieces of potential disinformation being spread. The number of pieces of disinformation sourced is therefore a suitable indicator of how accurate our identification of the ecosystems was.

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The number of pieces of disinformation sourced in real time: Sourcing of disinformation in real time - more beneficial than doing it after it has been spread - is an effective measure of countering the phenomenon. The number of pieces of disinformation processed in real time and the proportion of these compared to the global number of narratives sourced is an accurate indicator of evaluating our contribution.

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The number of accounts spreading our results on social media: this is another suitable indicator of the extent to which we influenced the framing and perception of the news.

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The number of news stories mentioning our initiative: the number of mentions of both our initiative in international media, as well as of EU DisinfoLab in Italian media, suitably represents the impact our work had on public opinion within the electoral period.

With regard to the number of disinformative narratives sourced, we were able to detect various pieces of potentially fake news with the use of Nuzzel; a tool providing a personalized, customizable news feed and customized newsletters. After setting up a Twitter account to

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monitor news within the tool, we linked it to a dedicated Slack channel and monitored the content, which was reported by the tool almost daily.

Results Between December 17th and March 4th, we analysed 171 articles from various media outlets.

The content of these articles was rarely completely fake, but we noticed a certain tendency for misinformation and biased content coming from some specific websites (such as ImolaOggi, Il Populista, Scenari Economici, Dagospia and Riscatto Nazionale).

Having received a lot of content from Nuzzel we also had the chance to compare our findings with a list of untrustworthy websites created by the fact-checking platform Butac.

Butac’s list has been developed by their team of fact-checkers with the aid of their own community. It is organised in different categories, each one including a list of websites, which have been proven to spread certain types of information: ●

Satirical: news published with a disclaimer of being fake, content designed for entertainment.

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Pseudo-journalism: these websites use journalistic language to write articles which are often based on little factual information, with the aim of capturing the audience’s attention and generating traffic. They touch on numerous topics, including politics, religion, migration or economy. These websites are perceived as the most likely to spread disinformation since most readers agree with the position expressed in the content and cannot distinguish between factual news and news from unreliable sources, published without any prior verification.

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Conspiracy theories: these websites promote one or more conspiracy theories and share content with the assumption that all opposing information offered by mainstream media and platforms is false.

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Scientific disinformation: websites that promote experiments, inventions and medical treatments without proven scientific basis or value.

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Clickbait: websites which were created as media outlets but exploit fake news content to increase traffic by pushing fabricated news and - sometimes - publish a debunking of the same news in the following days.

The number of news stories spotted using our Nuzzel channel was 171, with articles coming from mainstream media outlets such as La Repubblica, Il Fatto Quotidiano, La Stampa and many others, but also from more recently created outlets, showing a strong pro-Russian, antiEuropean point of view such as Riscatto Nazionale, Primato Nazionale and Scenari Economici.

Using First Draft News’ categorisation of disinformation and misinformation, the news spotted through Nuzzel can be classified as follows:

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The rest of the news we spotted was either real (100) or personal views of bloggers (18).

Out of 171 news spotted, 53 were recognised as fake, misleading or manipulated to push a specific message, which was encased either in a Eurosceptic, anti-European discourse, or mostly anti-migrant. Still, most of the news we spotted was either real, meaning that the news was reported as accurate and neutral (100), or an expression of personal views on political, economic and European affairs (18).

If we look at the narratives involved in this categorisation, what is interesting to notice is that most of the misleading content we spotted on Nuzzel concerned directly the Italian elections (5 articles), the Italian economy (4 articles) or acts of violence committed by immigrants (4 articles).

In the false connections category, the elections narrative is the most present as well (5 articles), followed by a more economy-oriented narrative (2 articles).

The only article included in the false context category is structured around an Anti-EU narrative; this same narrative is also the most occurring in the manipulated content category (3 articles) and is followed by anti-migrant narratives (2 articles).

From a chronological point of view, if we divide the timeframe of the Nuzzel activity in two phases (one from mid-December until January 20th, and a second one from January 21st until elections day), we do not notice any major shift when it comes to disinformation content. In both phases, the most published type of disinformation is of the misleading kind, even though the quantity of articles with misleading content is higher in the second phase (from 10 to 19 articles). The number of articles with false connection is also an element, which increases during the second phase (from 4 to 8 articles), and the same can be said for manipulated content (4 to 7 articles). On the other hand, the number of real news decreases from 51 to 49 articles.

It is important to notice here that most of the fake news content is of the misleading kind. This shows how in Italy, when aiming to spread disinformation through the news, it is mostly achieved through publishing news written and presented in a way leading the audience to interpret it in a specific, predefined way.

These findings also led us to the conclusion that completely fabricated news is very rare in the Italian context. Most of the disinformation and misinformation is published on small media

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outlets as blogs, and a large part of the disinformation content is mostly shared through social media platforms. Facebook, in particular, is an important source of information for Italian people, who are favour the belief that platforms like Facebook and Twitter are reliable sources of information.

The evolution of the prevailing narrative within the content received through Nuzzel is worth noticing, as it seems strongly influenced by certain key events we noticed.

In the first period, from December 2017 to the beginning of February, the content was mostly characterized by economic and political news that depicted the European Union and the Euro as a threat for stability and growth. In this period, almost 80% of the news spotted via our monitoring concerned either the failures of the European Union in terms of stability, economy and governance (48%), or what this entails for the Italian economy (52%).

Starting from the beginning of February, the narrative clearly shifted towards an even more controversial one: the issue of racism and illegal immigration. This major shift in terms of narrative coincided with the “Macerata incident” - the death of Pamela Mastropietro, a young girl from the Marche region, who was supposedly killed by a Nigerian man. Along with the shooting and wounding of 9 black persons, committed by Luca Traini, a former Northern League candidate in the local elections in Macerata, it triggered the spread of a nationalistic, anti-migrant narrative, leading to a demonization of leftist movements, often presented as “the true evil” and “the violent ones”.

From this moment onward, most of the content reported by Nuzzel showed a clear focus on anti-migrant narrative: most of the news spotted between February and March concerned either racist violence and verbal attacks, or the clash between fascist and anti-fascist movements.

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Luca Traini’s salutation after his attack on black people was identified as a fascist salute, which contributed to the rise of clashes between fascist and anti-fascist groups. These clashes quickly spread in the streets in Italy, resulting in the rise of violence and aggressive behaviour.

This episode marked an important point in the general narrative during the electoral period, which focused a lot on this issue. The opposition of fascism and anti-fascism was also a popular topic in official speeches and statements from the parties’ representatives: for example, according to one of the news we sourced following an alert from Nuzzel, Matteo Salvini stated more than once that this kind of discourse is merely “an instrument to distract the masses from what’s really at stake”.

Notable cases Having developed the network of journalists, experts and fact-checkers for this project, as well as having the Nuzzel channel and conducting manual monitoring of the news, we made sure to always be immediately alerted of any major piece of fake news appearing on Twitter.

Following an analysis of the spread of a piece of debunked or not-debunked news, we always shared our findings on our Twitter accounts through a series of comprehensive threads, both in English and in Italian.

Below is a list of several disinformation and misinformation operations we encountered and analysed during the project.

January 21st, 2018: “Bus & Wi-Fi for migrants” case This is one of the very first pieces of news we sourced.

On January 21st, Nuzzel alerted us about a story published by the Italian platform Riscatto Nazionale, already known to debunkers as a pro-Russia news blog. The article concerned a call for tender held by the city of Turin, according to which 170 million euros were to be designated to welcome migrants and help them settle down: the money was supposedly going to be spent on free buses, free Wi-Fi, and various “luxuries” such as laundry service, hairdresser and psychological assistance.

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Screenshot of the Riscatto Nazionale article

The news spreading on Twitter started in the early evening of the 20th, and was intensively shared around 10pm, though the highest peak of sharing was reached the next day around 10am. The total amount of tweets linked to this article was 196.

Lifecycle of the news on Twitter made with Visibrain

The article itself was not very clear in terms of how the tender was going to be handled, and it was showing clear signs of suspicious content (poor writing, title written in all capital letters, and no references to an actual source of information). Hence, we started to investigate who was spreading the news on Twitter and what were the sources mentioned. With this crawling we succeeded in finding the primary source of this information: not only the news turned out to be fake, but the whole content of the article (which was also shared in two other news outlets, L’Agenda News and Imola Oggi) was exposed as a copy-paste of a Facebook post from the profile of Gianluca Vignale, a far-right Turin regional councillor.

The map below is a visual representation of what we found through our crawling: it shows that most of the spread of this news on Twitter came from two specific accounts, @riscattonaz (Twitter account of the media outlet Riscatto Nazionale) and @carmentpf, being then shared by members of their own communities. Every dot represents an account, meaning that all the dots in the lower-right side of the map are not part of a specific community but they all act independently without any retweets, mentions or replies. These isolated accounts have to be seen as non-influential, as they may be individuals with no relationships or semiautomated/automated accounts.

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Map of the spread of the “Bus & Wi-Fi for migrants” case

January 24th: Migrants beating a man in Rome On January 24th, thanks to our manual monitoring of potential disinformation amplifiers, we found a suspicious-looking video on the Twitter profile of Cesare Sacchetti, an Italian journalist writing for La Cruna dell’Ago: the video in question showed migrants assaulting and robbing a man in a public park in Rome.

The phrasing of the tweet was quite misleading, and it clearly aimed at showing a correlation between migration and violence.

In parallel to our work of crawling data and mapping the conversations, we established collaboration with the developer of the InVid plugin in order to propose forensics for image analysis. Jointly, we reached the following conclusions:   

The video was indeed recorded on Via Statilia in Rome (verified through a Google Street view); The assault did take place, as we found records of this assault in local newspapers as well (sources verification); According to journalists, the aggressors were not 4 but 3 people. Moreover, the assaulted man was another migrant whose smartphone had been stolen.

Most of our activity was, then, to be able to find better quality videos in other tweets in order to perform digital forensics analysis on the video and at least to timestamp it, but our efforts on that side were vain.

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Misleading tweets

The conversation map we produced in order to source the information showed the implication of an international Twitter account, @onlinemagazin, who posted the video first, even before it was posted by Cesare Sacchetti in a lower quality.

Looking at the timeline of the @onlinemagazin account, whose tweets are mainly written in English, we could see how this account was central in distributing right-wing extremist content in different European countries.

Spread of the content

We also notice that the spread of this content happened very fast bust stayed isolated between these two accounts. Moreover, we qualify this piece of information as misinformation because of its misleading characteristics.

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February 13th, 2018 – The Trenitalia case On February 13th, one of our Italian experts, Roberto Marchetto, alerted us about a new suspicious piece of news, which had already been debunked as fake. In the morning of February 12th, a man named Luca Caruso shared a Facebook post concerning a migrant who was supposedly traveling on a Frecciarossa train without having a valid ticket.

A partial screenshot of Caruso’s Facebook post

This post, which was published in the early morning hours, reached more than 120.000 reactions and 80.000 shares within a few hours. This post created a massive uproar on Facebook, and triggered a quick response from the Italian train company Trenitalia, owner of all Frecciarossa trains. In their statement, Trenitalia exposed the real facts behind what truly happened: the man was sitting on the wrong seat and his knowledge of Italian was not sufficient for him to properly communicate with the officer. The officer saw that the scene was attracting a lot of attention from the other passengers, so he took him out to the corridor to figure out what was happening.

Trenitalia case’s lifecycle

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The total of tweets linked to this news is 4657, with only a few of them being directly related or mentioning the original Facebook post. We noticed a peak in the discussions starting from the morning of February 13.

The first important tweet is from @davide, online editor at Forbes Italia, who debunked the story in the evening of February 12, after Trenitalia's declaration about what really happened; in the following hours, many other accounts started being active on the issue, with the aim of informing their communities about the fake nature of this information.

First journalist debunking of the story

Once the news was exposed as fake, several media outlets (e.g. @giornalettismo, the very first one tweeting about it) started showing interest in writing about the debunked story as well.

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Giornalettismo’s article on Twitter, “The true story of the black guy without any ticket on the Frecciarossa 9608 train - is not exactly as they told you”

This story received a rather weak spread on Twitter, while it received a much bigger coverage on Facebook. Also, most of the fact-checking has been handled by a group of bloggers, and it took roughly 24 hours before the result of the fact checking was spread.

Map of the spreading of the Trenitalia case on Twitter

February 18th: Dagospia video: A doctored video on migrants

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Quickly following the Macerata incident, we did observe a surge of content directly targeting migrants. For instance, Nuzzel has caught this video because of the interactions of some influential accounts like @a_meluzzi and @rinaldi_euro.

Tweet of the 16th of February sharing the video

Shared for the first time by the low-quality content website Dagospia, this tweet displays a video posted on Vimeo, and alternates footage of TV news showing growing poverty in Italy and low-quality videos of black men asking the Italian state for more money and complaining about the quality of food.

We collected conversations around this video in order to identify active nodes and conversation networks. We found out that many of the conversations were isolated and limited to stakeholders already present in our network like @a_meluzzi, @rinaldi_euro or @riscattonaz. The whole spread on Twitter was very limited.

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Spread of the video

March 3rd, 2018: #SorosLega5Stelle After weeks of growing anti-Soros narratives on the news, the hashtag #SorosLega5Stelle was pushed on Twitter and started creating a buzz on the platform. The first tweets shared screenshots of what looked like official documents from Open Society Foundations, according to which the entity would have recently been providing funds to Lega and M5S. But a more meticulous look into these screenshots allowed us to spot several mistakes and typos, exposing the fake nature of these documents.

The news was mostly shared later by CasaPound-related accounts.

Six hours after the first tweet was published (at 12.12pm), the number of tweets concerning this news reached 10.578.

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Lifecycle of the #SorosLega5Stelle case on Twitter

The first tweet came from the account @RussiaTwe, and it was the very first tweet ever published from this account since its creation in January 2018. The tweet displayed a screenshot of a document from “Soros’ foundation”, Open Society Foundations, showing funding information related to a series of initiatives: inside the list, it was possible to spot the names of Matteo Salvini and Emma Bonino. Starting from this, we used InVid to verify the information contained in this .jpeg file, but all the information had already been erased from the metadata; still, when we took a closer look on the text itself by zooming on it, we noticed several grammar mistakes, particularly in the parts of text concerning Bonino and Salvini.

The first tweet including the hashtag #SorosLega5Stelle, from @russiantwe

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A closer look to the document shows several typos and grammar mistakes

Fifteen minutes after the news was published, a CasaPound candidate, Marco Racca, had picked up the story.

Marco Racca’s tweet, published 15 minutes after the first tweet. “Unbelievable. Will people now start opening their eyes on what this sovereigntist vote is?”

After this, the hashtag was mainly retweeted by CasaPound-related accounts. It is interesting to note the activity of the communities around two specific accounts: @lucabattanta, who was the very first to spread the counter-narrative about the fake nature of the information, and @nina_moric, a Croatian fashion model who’s very famous in Italy supporting CasaPound.

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Map of the spread of the news on Twitter

These accounts do not appear in the Russian network we previously mapped, which leads us to believe that #SorosLega5Stelle was a CasaPound Operation.

March 4th, 2018 – 500000 ballot sheets We kept our monitoring system active even during the electoral weekend, to ensure we do not miss any last-minute attempt at a disinformation operation with the goal of interfering with voting. This is when we spotted a new disinformation operation, which was published right before the opening of the voting stations.

According to Il Fatto, an Italian news platform whose name resembles the better known media outlet Il Fatto Quotidiano, more than 500.000 ballot sheets had been discovered on the day of the elections, within an operation that was supposedly being held in favor of the Democratic Party, the logo of which was supposedly visible on the ballot sheets. This news was published on March 3rd at 9:21pm.

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The article from Il Fatto: “Sicily: 500000 pre-completed voting sheets with the PD logo have been found. New voting sheets will be printed.”

The article explains the story of the voting sheets but doubles the number of sheets involved, also stating that the Democratic Party’s logo was well displayed on them, insinuating that the Democratic Party might be trying to influence the Sicilian vote.

Il Fatto has also a Facebook page, “La Voce del Popolo” (The voice of the people), in which a first post of the story was published on March 3rd at 10:22pm, one hour after the publication of the article on Il Fatto’s website.

The Facebook post mentioning Il Fatto’s article as it was published on La Voce del Popolo

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The first tweets started to be published in the early afternoon of March 4th, mainly from M5S supporters as @ManuPalo67:

@ManuPalo67’s tweet sharing the article from Il Fatto.

Less than one hour later, at 4:06pm, the debunking of the news started and it was firstly published by @neXTquotidiano:

“The fake news of the 500,000 voting ballots with votes for PD found in Sicily”

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In spite of the almost immediate debunking that followed the spreading of this news, the article was shared by the M5S spokesperson, Matteo Dall’Osso, who tagged several M5S leaders in his tweet, hence contributing to multiplying the reach to more than 140 thousand total interactions on all social media platforms.

Matteo Dall’Osso’s tweet and the list of party leaders he tagged

The Italian journalist Paolo Attivissimo noticed how Internet is often used from elected officials to influence elections thanks to disinformation, quoting the example of Matteo Dall’Osso:

Paolo Attivissimo (@disinformatico)’s tweet: “Good thing it’s only internet who spreads fake news. This is an Italian politician who spreads fake information from a website which is famous for its fake content.”

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This piece of fake news was shared by people close to the 5 Star Movement, but it was quickly debunked. In the map below, we can clearly see the role of “debunkers” such as @disinformatico and @neXtquotidiano, who quickly mobilised their own communities.

According to Fabio Giglietto and his team, this was the most shared news during the whole election period: at 6:35am of March 4th, just on Facebook, the story counted 26037 reactions, 21221 comments and 18067 shares.

Map of the story’s spread on Twitter

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