Luigi Di Maio, Five Star Movement (M5S) leader, attends the presentation of the political program for the upcoming general elections in Rome on January 30, 2018. The Italian general election will be held March 4, 2018. Giuseppe Ciccia/Press Association. All rights reserved.In the run-up to the general elections on March 4, Italy has seen a rise of right-wing parties in the polls:
the anti-immigrant Northern League, Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia and the
far-right Brothers of Italy are now heading into the poll with the winds at
their backs. As these forces
share a more or less pronounced anti-immigration stance, it shouldn’t be any surprise
that immigration has been one of the most debated issues in the electoral campaign.
Recent events have contributed as well to make the
issue of immigration even more prominent. For about three weeks now, the
usually quiet town of Macerata has
found itself at the heart of a heated – yet bitter – national debate about immigration. On
January 31 a Nigerian man – Innocent Oseghale, whose residence permit had
expired – was arrested on suspicion of the
murder of Pamela Mastropietro, an 18-year-old Italian girl whose
dismembered body was found in two suitcases in the environs of Macerata. On the
morning of 3 February, Luca Traini
– a far right extremist and onetime candidate for the Northern League – was arrested after wounding six African
immigrants in a two-hour shooting rampage in the streets of the central
Italian town. At the moment of the arrest, Traini wrapped himself in an Italian
flag and gave a fascist salute. Italian authorities claim to have seized a
Celtic cross flag (a symbol usually linked to neo-Nazism and white supremacism)
and right-wing literature including Hitler’s Mein Kampf from Traini’s
home.
Such a sequence of events turned up the heat of an already intense electoral debate. Northern
League’s leader Matteo Salvini condemned the shooting, but accused the
center-left of “flooding Italy with immigrants” and transforming the country
“into a refugee camp”. Silvio Berlusconi – whose party Forza Italia is a major ally of Salvini’s League – referred to
immigration as to a “social bomb”. Meanwhile, the center-left Democrats – the main incumbent
party – are having a hard time finding a balance between firmly condemning the
rising tide of xenophobia and reassuring citizens’ fears about immigration.
The debate on Twitter
To capture the reactions to the Macerata shootings and how the event has shaped
citizens’ attitudes towards immigration, from January 27 to February 9 we have been
following the Italian debate on immigration on Twitter. All in all, we
collected more than 800,000 tweets – sent by almost 115,000 users – containing
one or more keywords commonly used in the wide-ranging debate about immigration
and/or the murder of Pamela Mastropietro and the Macerata shooting.
As can be seen in Figure 1, immigration issues are widely discussed on Twitter. As the
electoral campaign heats up, the debate already runs at a constant but
significant pace before the shooting in Macerata. On the other hand, such a
traumatic event triggered a surge of online reactions, clearly visible in the ‘spike’ in Twitter activity centered
on 3 March. Against the background of the political turmoil generated by the
shooting, tweets about immigration reached a peak. The volume of conversations
remained high for the following days.
‘Openness’ vs. ‘closure’
To better understand the ways in which Italian
Twitter users have framed their discourse on immigration in the aftermath of
the Macerata attack, we tried to bring to the surface tweets explicitly
expressing attitudes or opinions, narrowing our focus only to conversations
that took place after March 3. By means of natural language processing (NLP),
we built an algorithm to separate ‘opinion’ tweets from news recast or
descriptive tweets. In this way, we were left with more than half a million tweets (sent by over 80,000 users) expressing a political opinion or an
emotional attitude towards immigration or immigration-related issues.
We then took a closer look at those conversations.
Although the debate includes many different sub-issues, a clear polarization emerges between
those users who tweeted blaming the
attacks on the rising number of immigrants in the country, and those who
took up to Twitter to condemn
instigations to xenophobia. We processed our ‘opinion’ tweets through an
algorithm to disentangle conversations and discussion that shape what can be
illustrated as a divide between
‘openness’ and ‘(national) closure’, and to determine on which side of
this divide Twitter users stand. Results of our classification are shown in
Figure 2.
Fig. 2. Share of pro-openness (55%) and pro-closure (45%) tweets in the aftermath of the Macerata Attack (February 3 – February 9 2018).
As the chart shows, in the aftermath of the
Macerata attack reactions from the
‘openness’ field seem to prevail over the ‘closure’ front, as the
majority of opinions and attitudes in our tweets (55 percent) can be attributed
to the pro-immigration area. To illustrate the many nuances of the debate, we
used a topic modelling algorithm to
identify distinctive features in each field and highlight different topics and
discourses. The word-clouds in Figure 4 show the most characteristic features
in each front.
Fig. 3. Most distinctive words and hashtags in ‘pro-openness’ (on the left) and ‘pro-closure’ tweets (on the right). The bigger the word, the higher the distinctiveness.As the clouds show, the fact that Traini’s drive-by
shooting was not only racially motivated, but also fascist-inspired ended up influencing the debate, particularly on
the ‘openness’ front. In the blue word-cloud, features such as fascism, anti-fascism,
stop fascism, racism, or roman salute are the most
evident. Ultimately, such an anti-fascist
rhetoric appears as the most
distinctive trait of the ‘open’ front, somewhat overshadowing arguments
of solidarity and claims in favour of better integration policies. On the other
hand, users in this field also tend to blame Salvini’s Northern League for the
deterioration of the public debate, and for using the migrant crisis to foster
xenophobia for political gain.
The red
(closure) cloud is filled with terms that reflect an anti-foreigner sentiment: in the
conversations we analyzed, words like drug dealer, immigrant, Nigerian,
visa, deportations and so on, contribute to emphasize the tie between the
migrant invasion and Italy’s various problems. Many users in this field
blame the lax immigration policies of the centre-left government (Minister of
the Interior Marco #Minniti) and the unintended consequences of the
well-meaning rhetoric of humanitarian aid (championed by President of the
Chamber of Deputies Laura #Boldrini). Interestingly enough, the presence
of hashtags such as #itaexit and #noEU suggests a clear link – in the ‘national closure’
discourse – between anti-immigration
and anti-European sentiment.
The political partisanship of
anti-immigration users: a tentative estimation
Detecting the political partisanship of social
media users is not a trivial task.
Contrary to data collected from public opinion surveys – where respondents are
often required to provide socio-demographic information, – social media data
most often come without explicit information regarding users’ voting
preferences. However, in recent years social scientists have been trying to
estimate the political affiliation of social media users using a variety of
methods based on users’ interactional behaviours on Twitter. In particular,
scholars agree that ‘retweets’ can be
considered as consistent indicators of support for a tweeter’s account
and content (Conover et al. 2011a; Conover et al. 2011b).
Starting from this assumption, having identified
the ‘anti-immigration’ users present in our dataset, we then attempted to estimate their political
partisanship on the basis of their retweets during the last months. Of
course, such a method does not allow for a precise determination of the
political affiliation of all our users – which goes beyond the scope of this
article – but we believe it can still provide useful insights into the
relationship between citizens’ political preferences and their attitudes
towards immigration.
Macerata
More specifically, we wanted to check whether users
who tend to retweet the leaders of parties displaying a negative attitude
towards immigration (Northern League, Brothers of Italy, Forza Italia and, to
some extent, the 5Stars Movement) were more likely to position themselves on
the ‘closure’ front in the aftermath of Macerata terrorist attack. To do so, we
collected all retweets made in the last three months by the 79,480 users who
have tweeted their opinions about Macerata between February 3 and February 9.
Among those, 4,972 resulted to have retweeted at least once contents from
Matteo Salvini (Northern League), 2,605 from Giorgia Meloni (Brothers of
Italy), 1,858 from Silvio Berlusconi (Forza Italia) and 2,478 from Luigi Di
Maio (5SM).
As a second step, we looked at how these ‘partisan’
users have positioned themselves in the Macerata debate. As Figure 4 shows, supporters of right-wing parties tend to take
anti-immigration stances even when debating the Macerata attack: 68% of
the tweets sent by Giorgia Meloni’s supporters have been classified by our
algorithm as pro-closure, followed by Matteo Salvini’s (67%) and Silvio
Berlusconi’s (62%).
Fig. 4. Percentage of ‘pro-closure’ tweets sent in the aftermath of the Macerata terrorist attack (3-8 February 2018) by users who in the past two months have retweeted at least once Giorgia Meloni (68%), Matteo Salvini (67%), Silvio Berlusconi (62%) and Luigi Di Maio (59%).The case of the 5SM is
particularly interesting. As commentators point out, the 5Stars Movement is “a political construction unlike
anything else in Europe. It has a rightist facade, over a leftist basement,
under an anarchic roof”. Unlike other populist movements, the 5SM doesn’t fit
neatly into the traditional far-left or far-right ideology, and its electorate
is distributed along the left-right political spectrum, with
a tendency towards the political centre. For these reasons, the 5Stars
Movement has been very cautious in taking stances with regard to
‘divisive issues’ such as the common currency and immigration. While the 5Stars’ leadership has often been accused of
building on widespread negative feelings about immigration, its electorate has proved much less cohesive on
this issue than on other topics,
such as socio-economic issues and the fight against political corruption.
Ultimately, the party stance on immigration is rather ambivalent and not always
easily decipherable. Our results show that 59% of the tweets sent after
Macerata by the 2,478 users who have retweeted Luigi Di Maio in the past two
months have been classified as ‘pro-closure’. Although the percentage is
significantly lower than that of ‘traditional’ right-wing parties, this finding
suggests the existence of at least a
group of Twitter users that, besides sympathising with the 5Stars
Movement, share their view on
immigration with right-wing parties and voters.
As the electoral campaign intensifies, political
heat surrounding immigration remains high. Whatever the outcome of 4 March
election will be, the issue of immigration is here to stay.