Followers and political parties

A study made by the researchers of the Institute of Informatics and Telematics of Cnr of Pisa, coordinated by Maurizio Tesconi, who work within the PoliCom.online research group, sheds light on the active, inactive and fake followers of political leaders and parties on Twitter.

In recent times when it comes to fake accounts and bots you can not help but think of the ‘follower factories’, in a very apt definition used by the New York Times in a recent investigation. The Times highlighted how many little-known characters in the US show bought hundreds of thousands of followers to talk about themselves and gain visibility that they otherwise would not have.

Italian political class, however, is ‘correct’ with users: it is not in fact from the data that none of the leaders has bought followers on Twitter to grow their absolute number, aware that without retweets – for political purposes – that number does not mean anything.

In the article of  newspaper “Repubblica” you can find a summary of the study by the Maurizio Tesconi group.