Extracting significant signal of news consumption from social networks: the case of Twitter in Italian political elections

Understand

According to the Eurobarometer report about EU media use of May 2018, the number of European citizens who consult on-line social networks for accessing information is considerably increasing.

• In this work we analyze approximately $10^6$ tweets exchanged during the last Italian elections.
• By using an entropy-based null model discounting the activity of the users, we first identify potential political alliances within the group of verified accounts: if two verified users are retweeted more than expected by the non-verified ones, they are likely to be related.
• Then, we derive the users' affiliation to a coalition measuring the polarization of unverified accounts.