Fake accounts detection and users’ polarization are two very well known topics concerning the social media sphere, that have been extensively discussed and analyzed, both in the academic literature and in everyday life. Social bots are autonomous accounts that are explicitly created to increase the number of followers of a target user, in order to inflate its visibility and consensus in a social media context. For this reason, a great variety of methods for their detection have been proposed and tested. Polarisation, also known as confirmation bias, is instead the common tendency to look for information that confirms one's preexisting beliefs, while ignoring opposite ones. Within this environment, groups of individuals characterized by the same system of beliefs are very likely to form. In the present talk we will first review part of the literature discussing both these topics. Then we will focus on a new dataset collecting tweets from the last Italian parliament elections in 2018 and some preliminary results will be discussed.
