During this time, online social networks, more than ever, have represented an alternative solution for social life, allowing users to interact and debate with each other. Countries such as Italy have enforced a total lockdown lasting several months, with most of the population forced to remain at home. The COVID-19 pandemic is not only having a heavy impact on healthcare but also changing people's habits and the society we live in. Moreover, we observe a great diversity in discussed topics over time: whereas some topics attract attention only momentarily, others, centered around more fundamental political discussions, remain consistently active over time. Also, communities built around political discussions tend to be more dynamic, although top commenters remain active and preserve community membership over time. We show that communities discussing political topics tend to be more engaged in the debate by writing longer comments, using more emojis, hashtags and negative words than in other subjects. We extract and characterize the communities of co-commenters in terms of topological structure, properties of the discussions carried out by community members, and how some community properties, notably community membership and topics, evolve over time. We base our study on the analysis of 10 weeks of data centered around major elections in Brazil and Italy, following both politicians and other celebrities. Unlike casual and accidental co-interactions which normally happen in large volumes, salient co-interactions are key elements driving the online discussions and, ultimately, the information dissemination. In particular, we are interested in salient co-interactions, i.e., interactions of co-commenters that occur more often than expected by chance and under independent behavior. Specifically, we investigate the emergence of communities of co-commenters, that is, groups of users who often interact by commenting on the same posts and may be driving the ongoing online discussions. We here analyze online discussions on Instagram, notably in political topics, from a network perspective. As a result, political figures now leverage the platform to spread opinions and political agenda.
Instagram has been increasingly used as a source of information especially among the youth.
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