Twitter as social media arena for polarised social representations about the (im)migration: The controversial discourse in the Italian and international political frame

Abstract

Grounded in social representation theory and its empirical investigation into the ‘social arena’, inspired by the ‘modelling paradigmatic approach’, the research presented in this article is part of a larger project aimed at reconstructing the ‘multi-voice’, and ‘multi-agent’ discourse about (im)migration. Specifically, this contribution’s focus is on the exploration of shaping and sharing social representations about (im)migrants through communication via the social medium ‘Twitter’. A total of 1,958 tweets (967 Italian and 991 English tweets) were analysed through Systeme Portable Pour L’Analyse Des Donnees Textuelles [Portable System for Textual Data Analysis]SPAD in two lexical correspondence analyses. The results show a dichotomous discourse organising a semantic space structured around five different factors for the two distinct Twitter corpora: both clearly show polarised social representations of ‘immigrants–migrants’, leading to exclusion–inclusion policies depending on the discursive agent’s ideological affiliation in the Italian and the international political frame. Used as a propaganda tool, Twitter echoes the related pro- and anti-immigration polemical representations of opposite political leaders in posts that are positioned differently in relation to the progressive/conservative ideology.