First Level: The Anatomy of the Disinformation Message Between Narratives and Adopted Strategies

To analyze the complexity of disinformation phenomenon on social media platforms, the analysis on the Italian case was conducted by building a methodological path on two levels. The first level of the work, i.e., the analysis of the disinformation message, will be illustrated here. The analysis techniques useful for studying the message conveyed by disinformation content and those useful for reconstructing the strategies used to spread the messages are illustrated. The results of the first level of analysis show the narrative promoted by Italian disinformation pages on Facebook. This is positioned not only as a communication strategy based on polarized topic, but also as a filter for interpreting the main events in the world. What emerges that the disinformative message is polarizing and is an expression of a more complex and varied ideological undergrowth and expression of a particular extreme political position. Regarding the strategies used, the analysis shows how the production of disinformation intensified before or during important Italian democratic decision-making processes. In the end, the temporal distance between the extraction and analysis phases allowed to know the contents removed from the platform and understand how Facebook’s censorship system operated.