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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 
Year:  2020 Issue: 1 Language: Italian 
Pages:  21 Pg. 351-371 FullText PDF:  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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Bruno Gabriel Salvador Casara, Caterina Suitner, Tomaso Erseghe, Immigrations, styles and topics: A study about Italian politics tweet in "RICERCHE DI PSICOLOGIA " 1/2020, pp. 351-371, DOI:10.3280/RIP2020-001016

   

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