of Journalism has shown that these websites have a minor reach compared to mainstream media outlets (Freedom House, 2019). In 2019, after the activist group Avaaz reported on some of these networks, Facebook removed twenty-three accounts that were violating the company’s authenticity policy and were associated with both parties (Freedom House, 2019). Gianroberto Casaleggio, one of the cofounders of M5S, was already associated with social engineering techniques to manipulate opinions within forums and newsgroups at the end of the 1990s (Joint Research Centre (European Commission), 2019). With the creation of M5S and in the run-up to the elections, a broader propaganda machine was established. M5S has since at least 2016 been affiliated with a series of blogs, “independent news” outlets and social accounts that often share misleading or alarmist stories about corruption and anti-politics—especially in the early days of the movement—, tragic events and hyper partisan pieces about immigration, echoing nationalist and Islamophobic rhetoric, and conspiracy theories in the run-up to the general elections. On the other hand, Lega Nord was linked to a network of websites that were not party-related, but that shared the same Google codes. Some of these websites had pro-Putin and conspiracy theories content, other pro-party, anti-immigration and Islamophobic one (Bayer et al., 2019). Giglietto et al. (2019) analysed political news stories published or shared in pages, groups and verified public profiles in both Facebook and Instagram in the run up to the 2018 general election and the 2019 European election. Identified networks shared the same link within a limited timeframe, indicating a baseline of “coordinated link sharing” (Giglietto et al., 2019). Most of the activities were aligned to Lega Nord and anti-migration, especially among highly coordinated networks. Moreover, several websites and Facebook pages were blacklisted by fact-checking websites (Giglietto et al., 2019). In line with this, in a thorough analysis of the media landscape during the 2018 general elections, Giglietto et al. (2018) highlighted that Lega had “the highest number of media source adjudicated while the sources in the M5S category gathered the highest volume of overall Facebook interactions”. Furthermore, they identified three sources among the top twenty-five URLs: Ilfatto.org, which they explicitly indicate as having content that may be “inaccurate or completely made up”; Italia24ore.com, which is categorized as a for-profit fake news site; and inews24.it, which is part of an anti-immigrant network of websites and Facebook pages (Giglietto et al., 2018). It is also worth noting that they state that Italian extreme-right groups organized via 4chan, 8chan, and Telegram in crafting the content and strategies to influence public opinion and favour League and the Brothers of Italy parties (Ebner and Davey, 2018, as cited in Giglietto et al., 2018). As regards Twitter, according to Pierri et al. (2020), during the five-month period leading up to the 2019 European Parliament elections, there was a small proportion of tweets linked to disinformation websites, which mainly focused on polarizing content related to immigration, national safety and nationalism. They were mostly related to Lega Nord—“the main cited leader”— and M5S’s narratives and sometimes targeted Partito Democratico (Pierri et al., 2020). The report indicates that there is little evidence of bot activity during this period. Lastly, it is worth mentioning that, in addition to the already mentioned disinformation campaign which appears to have originated abroad, NewGuard has also identified a network of ten Facebook pages that appear to be diverse in content (e.g. fashion, aphorisms, lifestyles, and others) but have recently started to spread disinformation about COVID-19, such as that which suggests that lemon and water could defeat the virus or that the government denied tests 218