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:
\nthe anti-immigrant Northern League, Silvio Berlusconi\u2019s Forza Italia and the
\nfar-right Brothers of Italy are now heading into the poll with the winds at
\ntheir backs. As these forces
\nshare a more or less pronounced anti-immigration stance, it shouldn\u2019t be any surprise
\nthat immigration has been one of the most debated issues in the electoral campaign. <\/i><\/p>\n
Recent events have contributed as well to make the Such a sequence of events turned up the heat of an already intense electoral debate. Northern To capture the reactions to the Macerata shootings and how the event has shaped As can be seen in Figure 1, immigration issues are widely discussed on Twitter. As the <\/i><\/p>\n To better understand the ways in which Italian We then took a closer look at those conversations. Fig. 2. Share of pro-openness (55%) and pro-closure (45%) tweets in the aftermath of the Macerata Attack (February 3 – February 9 2018).<\/p>\n As the chart shows, in the aftermath of the Fig. 3. Most distinctive words and hashtags in \u2018pro-openness\u2019 (on the left) and \u2018pro-closure\u2019 tweets (on the right). The bigger the word, the higher the distinctiveness.As the clouds show, the fact that Traini\u2019s drive-by The red Detecting the political partisanship of social Starting from this assumption, having identified More specifically, we wanted to check whether users As a second step, we looked at how these \u2018partisan\u2019 Fig. 4. Percentage of \u2018pro-closure\u2019 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 Ultimately, the party stance on immigration is rather ambivalent and not always As the electoral campaign intensifies, political 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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1103","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1103"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1103\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nissue of immigration even more prominent. For about three weeks now, the
\nusually quiet town of Macerata has
\nfound itself at the heart of a heated \u2013 yet bitter \u2013 national debate about immigration. On
\nJanuary 31 a Nigerian man \u2013 Innocent Oseghale, whose residence permit had
\nexpired \u2013 was arrested on suspicion of the
\nmurder of Pamela Mastropietro, an 18-year-old Italian girl whose
\ndismembered body was found in two suitcases in the environs of Macerata. On the
\nmorning of 3 February, Luca Traini
\n\u2013 a far right extremist and onetime candidate for the Northern League \u2013 was arrested after wounding six African
\nimmigrants in a two-hour shooting rampage in the streets of the central
\nItalian town. At the moment of the arrest, Traini wrapped himself in an Italian
\nflag and gave a fascist salute. Italian authorities claim to have seized a
\nCeltic cross flag (a symbol usually linked to neo-Nazism and white supremacism)
\nand right-wing literature including Hitler\u2019s Mein Kampf <\/em>from Traini\u2019s
\nhome.<\/p>\n
\nLeague\u2019s leader Matteo Salvini condemned the shooting, but accused the
\ncenter-left of \u201cflooding Italy with immigrants\u201d and transforming the country
\n\u201cinto a refugee camp\u201d. Silvio Berlusconi \u2013 whose party Forza Italia is a major ally of Salvini\u2019s League \u2013 referred to
\nimmigration as to a \u201csocial bomb\u201d. Meanwhile, the center-left Democrats <\/strong>\u2013 the main incumbent
\nparty \u2013 are having a hard time finding a balance between firmly condemning the
\nrising tide of xenophobia and reassuring citizens\u2019 fears about immigration. <\/p>\nThe debate on Twitter <\/strong><\/h2>\n
\ncitizens\u2019 attitudes towards immigration, from January 27 to February 9 we have been
\nfollowing the Italian debate on immigration on Twitter. All in all, we
\ncollected more than 800,000 tweets – sent by almost 115,000 users \u2013 containing
\none or more keywords commonly used in the wide-ranging debate about immigration
\nand\/or the murder of Pamela Mastropietro and the Macerata shooting.<\/p>\n
\nelectoral campaign heats up, the debate already runs at a constant but
\nsignificant pace before the shooting in Macerata. On the other hand, such a
\ntraumatic event triggered a surge of online reactions, clearly visible in the \u2018spike\u2019 in Twitter activity centered
\non 3 March. Against the background of the political turmoil generated by the
\nshooting, tweets about immigration reached a peak. The volume of conversations
\nremained high for the following days.<\/p>\n\u2018Openness\u2019 vs. \u2018closure\u2019<\/strong>\u00a0<\/h2>\n
\nTwitter users have framed their discourse on immigration in the aftermath of
\nthe Macerata attack, we tried to bring to the surface tweets explicitly
\nexpressing attitudes or opinions, narrowing our focus only to conversations
\nthat took place after March 3. By means of natural language processing (NLP),
\nwe built an algorithm to separate \u2018opinion\u2019 tweets from news recast or
\ndescriptive 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
\nemotional attitude towards immigration or immigration-related issues. <\/p>\n
\nAlthough the debate includes many different sub-issues, a clear polarization emerges between
\nthose users who tweeted blaming the
\nattacks on the rising number of immigrants in the country, and those who
\ntook up to Twitter to condemn
\ninstigations to xenophobia. We processed our \u2018opinion\u2019 tweets through an
\nalgorithm to disentangle conversations and discussion that shape what can be
\nillustrated as a divide between
\n\u2018openness\u2019 and \u2018(national) closure\u2019, and to determine on which side of
\nthis divide Twitter users stand. Results of our classification are shown in
\nFigure 2.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n
\nMacerata attack reactions from the
\n\u2018openness\u2019 field seem to prevail over the \u2018closure\u2019 front, as the
\nmajority of opinions and attitudes in our tweets (55 percent) can be attributed
\nto the pro-immigration area. To illustrate the many nuances of the debate, we
\nused a topic modelling algorithm to
\nidentify distinctive features in each field and highlight different topics and
\ndiscourses. The word-clouds in Figure 4 show the most characteristic features
\nin each front.<\/i><\/p>\n
\nshooting was not only racially motivated, but also fascist-inspired ended up influencing the debate, particularly on
\nthe \u2018openness\u2019 front. In the blue word-cloud, features such as fascism, anti-fascism,
\nstop fascism, racism, or roman salute are the most
\nevident. Ultimately, such an anti-fascist
\nrhetoric appears as the most
\ndistinctive trait of the \u2018open\u2019 front, somewhat overshadowing arguments
\nof solidarity and claims in favour of better integration policies. On the other
\nhand, users in this field also tend to blame Salvini\u2019s Northern League for the
\ndeterioration of the public debate, and for using the migrant crisis to foster
\nxenophobia for political gain. <\/i><\/p>\n
\n(closure) cloud is filled with terms that reflect an anti-foreigner sentiment: in the
\nconversations we analyzed, words like drug dealer, immigrant, Nigerian,
\nvisa, deportations<\/em> and so on, contribute to emphasize the tie between the
\nmigrant invasion <\/em>and Italy\u2019s various problems. Many users in this field
\nblame the lax immigration policies of the centre-left government (Minister of
\nthe Interior Marco #Minniti<\/em>) and the unintended consequences of the
\nwell-meaning rhetoric of humanitarian aid (championed by President of the
\nChamber of Deputies Laura #Boldrini<\/em>). Interestingly enough, the presence
\nof hashtags such as #itaexit <\/em>and #noEU <\/em>suggests a clear link \u2013 in the \u2018national closure\u2019
\ndiscourse \u2013 between anti-immigration
\nand anti-European sentiment. <\/p>\nThe political partisanship of
\nanti-immigration users: a tentative estimation<\/strong><\/h2>\n
\nmedia users is not a trivial task.
\nContrary to data collected from public opinion surveys \u2013 where respondents are
\noften required to provide socio-demographic information, \u2013 social media data
\nmost often come without explicit information regarding users\u2019 voting
\npreferences. However, in recent years social scientists have been trying to
\nestimate the political affiliation of social media users using a variety of
\nmethods based on users\u2019 interactional behaviours on Twitter. In particular,
\nscholars agree that \u2018retweets\u2019 can be
\nconsidered as consistent indicators of support for a tweeter\u2019s account
\nand content (Conover et al. 2011a; Conover et al. 2011b). <\/p>\n
\nthe \u2018anti-immigration\u2019 users present in our dataset, we then attempted to estimate their political
\npartisanship on the basis of their retweets during the last months. Of
\ncourse, such a method does not allow for a precise determination of the
\npolitical affiliation of all our users \u2013 which goes beyond the scope of this
\narticle \u2013 but we believe it can still provide useful insights into the
\nrelationship between citizens\u2019 political preferences and their attitudes
\ntowards immigration. <\/p>\nMacerata<\/strong><\/h2>\n
\nwho tend to retweet the leaders of parties displaying a negative attitude
\ntowards immigration (Northern League, Brothers of Italy, Forza Italia and, to
\nsome extent, the 5Stars Movement) were more likely to position themselves on
\nthe \u2018closure\u2019 front in the aftermath of Macerata terrorist attack. To do so, we
\ncollected all retweets made in the last three months by the 79,480 users who
\nhave tweeted their opinions about Macerata between February 3 and February 9.
\nAmong those, 4,972 resulted to have retweeted at least once contents from
\nMatteo Salvini (Northern League), 2,605 from Giorgia Meloni (Brothers of
\nItaly), 1,858 from Silvio Berlusconi (Forza Italia) and 2,478 from Luigi Di
\nMaio (5SM). <\/p>\n
\nusers have positioned themselves in the Macerata debate. As Figure 4 shows, supporters of right-wing parties tend to take
\nanti-immigration stances even when debating the Macerata attack: 68% of
\nthe tweets sent by Giorgia Meloni\u2019s supporters have been classified by our
\nalgorithm as pro-closure, followed by Matteo Salvini\u2019s (67%) and Silvio
\nBerlusconi\u2019s (62%).\u00a0<\/p>\n
\nparticularly interesting. As commentators point out, the 5Stars Movement is \u201ca political construction unlike
\nanything else in Europe. It has a rightist facade, over a leftist basement,
\nunder an anarchic roof\u201d. Unlike other populist movements, the 5SM doesn\u2019t fit
\nneatly into the traditional far-left or far-right ideology, and its electorate
\nis distributed along the left-right political spectrum, with
\na tendency towards the political centre. For these reasons, the 5Stars
\nMovement has been very cautious in taking stances with regard to
\n\u2018divisive issues\u2019 such as the common currency and immigration. While the 5Stars\u2019 leadership has often been accused of
\nbuilding on widespread negative feelings about immigration, its electorate has proved much less cohesive on
\nthis issue than on other topics,
\nsuch as socio-economic issues and the fight against political corruption.<\/i><\/p>\n
\neasily decipherable. Our results show that 59% of the tweets sent after
\nMacerata by the 2,478 users who have retweeted Luigi Di Maio in the past two
\nmonths have been classified as \u2018pro-closure\u2019. Although the percentage is
\nsignificantly lower than that of \u2018traditional\u2019 right-wing parties, this finding
\nsuggests the existence of at least a
\ngroup of Twitter users that, besides sympathising with the 5Stars
\nMovement, share their view on
\nimmigration with right-wing parties and voters.<\/p>\n
\nheat surrounding immigration remains high. Whatever the outcome of 4 March
\nelection will be, the issue of immigration is here to stay.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"