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.

Social Representations, Social Identity, and Representational Imputation

“…For instance, regarding an object such as immigration, through communication and exposure to diverse sources of information such as social media, different groups can construct and share a SR which may encompass different beliefs depending on their values and ideology. Right-wing people may then perceive immigration as a threat, while left-wing people can perceive immigration as a right for people who need asylum and protection (de Rosa et al., 2020, 2021).…”

Rape Culture, Revictimization, and Social Representations: Images and Discourses on Sexual and Violent Crimes in the Digital Sphere in Mexico

“…This theory argues that in the digital sphere, the constructs, beliefs, valuations, discourses, and cultural burdens of people's opinions are replicated (Farah, 2011;Höijer, 2011). As the discourse of social networks offers us a naturalistic setting for social thinking (Stubbs-Richardson et al, 2018), such networks have frequently been used for the analysis of Social Representations (SRs) (Idoiaga et al, 2019(Idoiaga et al, , 2020de Rosa et al, 2021;Zamperini et al, 2012). From this research, we conclude that social networks are becoming a field of special interest for analyzing contemporary changes.…”

Mirrored Social Representations of Canadian Caseworkers with Migratory Paths Intervening with Refugees in the Host Country

“…Those representations are highly dependent on the echo-chamber effect in the media, created by the discursive social positioning of the political leaders and governments, orienting their inclusive or exclusionary policies towards the immigrants. Results from de Rosa's wide research program based on field and media studies on social representations [44,49,52,[86][87][88][89][90] "show how the multiple denominations of migrants-also corresponding to different legal status (refugee, immigrants, stateless, newcomer, alien, undocumented, asylum-seeker) are often merged in the discourse 'for' and 'by' lay people in polarised representations of the immigrants as 'unknown', 'foreign' often associated in a one-sided manner with concepts such as 'dangerous', 'extraneous' and generally presented in the media as 'invaders,' even stigmatised as 'criminal' or potential 'terrorists'legitimising 'fear' and evoking the 'need for barriers' and protection of one's own territory by the population of the host country. From the other side, however, they are viewed as 'forced new home seekers' and social victims" [44].…”

“…Future developments in this study may overcome some of the limitations of the present investigation by (a) Increasing the number of research participants to make comparisons between subgroups of caseworkers, depending on their higher or lower affinity in terms of the geo-cultural area of origin of their own migratory experience, spoken language, previous work experience and age compared with their target group of refugees; (b) Increasing the number of professionals to be interviewed, depending on their professional involvement with the refugees' relocation, also including native Canadian caseworkers with no personal migratory experience to be compared with the research participants with a migration background interviewed in this study; (c) Comparing institutional policies towards migrants and refugees in different Western countries with different exposure to migratory flows, for example, by comparing the Canadian policies for the integration of immigrants and refugees with those adopted in the USA under presidents of different political orientations or with those adopted at a supranational level by the European Commission and by different EU member states in Europe exposed to different routes of migratory flows through the Mediterranean Sea or the Balkan routes (45,52,53,(87)(88)(89)(90)(91). (d) Conducting a longitudinal study to explore:…”