ITA-ELECTION-2022: A multi-platform dataset of social media conversations around the 2022 Italian general election

TL;DR

This paper introduces the first comprehensive multi-platform dataset of Italian-language political conversations during the 2022 Italian general election, enabling in-depth analysis of social media's role in democracy.

Contribution

It provides a large, multi-platform dataset with posts, metadata, political ads, and political handle information, specifically focused on the 2022 Italian election.

Findings

Dataset includes millions of posts from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter.

Metadata and political ads are included for comprehensive analysis.

Data covers a four-month period around the election.

Abstract

Online social media play a major role in shaping public discourse and opinion, especially during political events. We present the first public multi-platform dataset of Italian-language political conversations, focused on the 2022 Italian general election taking place on September 25th. Leveraging public APIs and a keyword-based search, we collected millions of posts published by users, pages and groups on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, along with metadata of TikTok and YouTube videos shared on these platforms, over a period of four months. We augmented the dataset with a collection of political ads sponsored on Meta platforms, and a list of social media handles associated with political representatives. Our data resource will allow researchers and academics to further our understanding of the role of social media in the democratic process.