Noisy microinfluencers in 2016 referendum campaign

Online social data analysis on Facebook

Abstract

Our essay tries to explore influencers role in political-electoral field, with specific reference to the recent Italian Constitutional Referendum campaign. Through online social data analysis, conducted through content analysis techniques, we will try to understand influencers relevance, and micro-influence dynamics on Facebook. We have focused on referendum groups and pages, and we have conducted analyses reffered to sentiment expressed from posts published on the pages, and to the types of influencer on the groups. Our most relevant finding has been discovering the importance of microinfluencers who generate a bottom-up debate on Facebook, with emotive and “contropolitical” tones, and interpretate their original role of “noisy majority” in an unaware and disorganized way.