Constitutional Referendum, the general elections on 4 March 2018, in which M5S came first and League jumped from 4% to 17% of votes, and the 2019 European Parliament elections, in which League obtained 34% of votes. According to WIRED, Web365 and NextMediaWeb, both agencies owned by Giancarlo and Davide Colono, managed a network of websites that promoted nationalist and Islamophobic content, often associated with Lega Nord’s narrative (Fontana, 2020). After the network was revealed in 2017, the two entrepreneurs updated it with a more complex and decentralized structure. Similarly, Planet Share, an agency owned by Andrea Caroletti, has established a network of around 140 domain sites that follow a similar logic and interact with Colono’s networks (Fontana, 2020). As reported by Fontana (2020), the visible website of Planet Share was registered by Web365. Andrea Caroletti also chairs La Luce di Maria, a not-for-profit cultural association that organizes pilgrimages and has a website and a Facebook page with more than 1.4 million followers. Through its Facebook page it shares conservative and antiscientific content, as well as content produced by the above mentioned Web365 and Planet Share networks (Fontana, 2020). M5S leadership have been identified as being behind some of the websites revealed in 2017, including its co-founder Gianroberto Casalleggio (Tze Tze1 and La Fucina2 websites are owned by his firm Casaleggio Associati). Other sites shared IP addresses, Google Analytics and AdSense IDs with Beppe Grillo’s blog and M5S official websites (Bayer et al., 2019). Misinformation and fake news remain a concern for the country: in addition to campaigns organized by domestic teams, data released in early 2018 also suggest that the same Russian company (Internet Research Agency, IRA) which was behind disinformation campaigns during the 2016 US election was also responsible for thousands of tweets and profiles in Italy. The US information website Fivethirtyeight.com released nine Excel spreadsheets containing millions of tweets and profiles which US special counsel Robert Mueller strongly suspects are from the IRA and some of the content is in Italian. So far there does not appear to have been official response from the Italian government. While it is unlikely that the Lega party or Five Star Movement directly supported or paid for these tweets, most of the content shared by IRA profiles was supportive of these two parties and a report from the Atlantic Council suggests close ties between both parties and several Russian individuals. In the case of Lega, a recording shows evidence of negotiations of a deal to send millions of dollars to the party to sustain their European election campaign, which was permissible due to a legal loophole that until January 2019 permitted foreign funding to political parties (Nardelli, 2019). With the COVID-19 crisis, several allegations of Russian disinformation in Italy have also been raised (Pellegatta, 2020). Following disinformation campaigns related to COVID-19, there are additional allegations that China has used bots to undertake pro-Chinese and anti-European Union propaganda (Carrer & Bechis, 2020; DFRLab, 2020). The official Twitter account of the Embassy of China in Italy has been identified as a key driver of the campaign. Also related to the publications were hashtags associated to Lega Nord. Moreover, in Twitter’s disclosure of state-backed operations by China in June 2020, it can be observed that Italy and Italia occur several times in tweets where the help received by the Chinese authorities was praised (Twitter Safety, 2020). 216