  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. Countries such as
Italy have enforced a total lockdown lasting several months, with most of the
population forced to remain at home. 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. Hence, it is of
paramount importance to understand the changing use of social networks brought
about by the pandemic. In this paper, we analyze how the interaction patterns
around popular influencers in Italy changed during the first six months of
2020, within Instagram and Facebook social networks. We collected a large
dataset for this group of public figures, including more than 54 million
comments on over 140 thousand posts for these months. We analyze and compare
engagement on the posts of these influencers and provide quantitative figures
for aggregated user activity. We further show the changes in the patterns of
usage before and during the lockdown, which demonstrated a growth of activity
and sizable daily and weekly variations. We also analyze the user sentiment
through the psycholinguistic properties of comments, and the results testified
the rapid boom and disappearance of topics related to the pandemic. To support
further analyses, we release the anonymized dataset.
