  Online Social Networks (OSNs) allow personalities and companies to
communicate directly with the public, bypassing filters of traditional medias.
As people rely on OSNs to stay up-to-date, the political debate has moved
online too. We witness the sudden explosion of harsh political debates and the
dissemination of rumours in OSNs. Identifying such behaviour requires a deep
understanding on how people interact via OSNs during political debates. We
present a preliminary study of interactions in a popular OSN, namely Instagram.
We take Italy as a case study in the period before the 2019 European Elections.
We observe the activity of top Italian Instagram profiles in different
categories: politics, music, sport and show. We record their posts for more
than two months, tracking "likes" and comments from users. Results suggest that
profiles of politicians attract markedly different interactions than other
categories. People tend to comment more, with longer comments, debating for
longer time, with a large number of replies, most of which are not explicitly
solicited. Moreover, comments tend to come from a small group of very active
users. Finally, we witness substantial differences when comparing profiles of
different parties.
