Immigrations, styles and topics: A study about Italian politics tweet

Journal title RICERCHE DI PSICOLOGIA
Author/s Bruno Gabriel Salvador Casara, Caterina Suitner, Tomaso Erseghe
Publishing Year 2020 Issue 2020/1 Language Italian
Pages 21 P. 351-371 File size 307 KB
DOI 10.3280/RIP2020-001016
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Immigration has been one of the most relevant topics during the Brexit Referendum, United States presidential election, and Italian and European Parliament elections (e.g., Zappettini, 2019; Faris, Roberts, Etling, Bourassa, Zuckerman, & Benkler, 2017). In particular, during these events, the anti-immigration-politicalgroups gain consensus (Muis and Immerzeel, 2017). In this study, we investigate, with a text-analysis of 1000 Italian political leaders’ tweets, which topics are associated with negative or positive sentiment toward immigrants. The results show that negative messages are associated, in a logistic regression model, with a populistic communication style, and with conspiracy suspicions. Moreover, a network analysis reveals that anti-immigration messages are associated with security and justice topics, whereas pro-immigration messages are associated with the topics of civil rights, culture, and Europe. Stylistics elements of populist and conspiratorial communication and their relation with the diffusion of anti-immigration contents and related consequences on composition and transmission of values, in social media context, are discussed.

Keywords: Immigration, populism, conspiratorial communication, social media, politics communication

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  • Migrazioni e psicologie. Introduzione al Forum Alessandro Antonietti, Antonella Marchetti, in RICERCHE DI PSICOLOGIA 1/2020 pp.13
    DOI: 10.3280/RIP2020-001002

Bruno Gabriel Salvador Casara, Caterina Suitner, Tomaso Erseghe, Immigrazione, stili e temi: uno studio sui tweet dei politici italiani in "RICERCHE DI PSICOLOGIA " 1/2020, pp 351-371, DOI: 10.3280/RIP2020-001016