Social media data from Italian newspapers

Citation Author(s):
Michela Del Vicario, Matteo Zignani, Sabrina Gaito, Walter Quattrociocchi, Gian Paolo Rossi
Submitted by:
Michela Del Vicario
Last updated:
Tue, 05/17/2022 - 22:17
DOI:
10.21227/H2433R
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Abstract 

The dataset includes a collection of news concerning one of the most divisive public debates supported on Italian media: the constitutional referendum (held on December 4th, 2016) . The data cover a total of four months and a half, from July 31st, 2016 to December 12th, 2016, a week after the date of the referendum, and come from either Facebook. We identify pubblic Twitter acounts of Italian official newspapers, following the exhaustive list provided by ADS, that is an association for the verification of newspaper circulation in Italy. 

Instructions: 

We adopt the Twitter Search API to gather all the tweets posted by the accounts of the news sources selected, during the specified time period.  Starting from that set, we select only tweets pointing to news whose URL is present in the Facebook dataset relative to the Italian constitutional referendum. From each tweet we collect information about the users who favored, retweeted, or replied. 
 
The data are divided into two tables:
 

  • the first one, "tweets" includes four fiels: "tweet_id.csv", "id_user", "text", "urls";
  • the second one "comments_tweets.csv"  also includes four fields: "tweet_id", "id_user", "text", "in_reply_to";
  • the last table "media_graph_rtfav.txt", includes two fields for the accounts and one for the number of shared users (in terms of favorites and retweets) by the two accounts.