Research on Disinformation: State of the Art and New Methodological Proposals

The disinformation phenomenon raises various and very interdisciplinary questions on which the scientific community has often clashed. An issue on which everyone agrees is that the term “fake news” is inadequate to describe the complex phenomena of information pollution and often it is indiscriminately to indicate that “something is wrong” in the digital public sphere. The work provides an overview of the aspects examined by academic research in relation to the disinformation phenomenon of and the analytical techniques adopted to date. Trying to overcome the conceptual and operational limits present in the literature, the work presents a methodological proposal to analyses disinformation, replicable in other contexts for anyone interested in investigating the phenomenon on social media. The methodological proposal is based on the development of an operationalization process capable of making the depth of its categories communicate with the scalability of the data. The Italian case is presented to explain the methodological path and to identify general archetypes and typical elements of disinformation strategies.