Research project CORIT will explore the relationship between toxicity of online public speech and forms of political radicalization of user-citizens and will analyze these processes in digital platforms, looking at how uncivil discourses transit between fringe platforms, mainstream platforms and legacy media.

a) the growth of incivility as a strategic communicative practice capable of benefiting the political visibility of certain actors (Bentivegna, Rega 2022);

b) the emergence of information disorder in contemporary political communication characterized by increasing misinformation, disinformation, media manipulation, coordinated inauthentic behaviour, and propaganda (Freelon & Wells, 2020). A recent study, in this regard, shows that citizens do not perceive clearly the problematic nature of political behaviour aimed at mystifying facts in order to discredit the opposing party (Bentivegna et al., 2022);

c) communicative polarization, which derives from difficulties denounced by several analyses, in getting in touch with alternative viewpoints. As Yarchi and colleagues point out (2020), this closure occurs through interactional polarization, such as echo chambers and filter bubbles, but also through positional and affective polarization dynamics, emerging from partisan social identity display, which also increases hostility between opposing political fields.

Such processes are enhanced by citizens’ participation in online alternative media, which have been correlated with disinformation ecosystems, the spread of conspiracy myths and the normalization of populist thinking and political extremism (Schwarzenegger, 2022).
More recent literature has shown how there is an interdependent relationship between the rise of alternative online spaces and the growth in far-right forms of extremism (Holt, 2018; Walther & McCoy, 2021), thus stressing a rising concern that “secluded online spaces can function as laboratories that develop extremist talking points that then find entry into the mainstream” (Lewandowsky et al., 2020, p.84). At the same time, these spaces “provide voices to marginalized and disadvantaged communities” (ibid.), so they can also represent new resources for public debate.

General description of methodology

To achieve these goals the project will rely on a mixed methods approach. Fringe platforms and closed groups are indeed resistant to approaches entirely based on big data and computational analysis (Boccia Artieri et al. 2021a). Moreover, an in-depth understanding of radicalising and uncivilised languages cannot do without a qualitative analysis capable of capturing the nuances of meaning and cultural cryptography practices. On the other hand, an entirely qualitative approach based on case studies would risk focusing on too small portions of the phenomenon, missing the overall picture of the Italian networked public sphere. The combination of digital methods with digital ethnography and news content analysis in the investigation of the Italian Telegramsphere constitutes an innovative aspect of the research, thus the project has the potential to develop research methods that will be useful in the future in the analysis of fringe platforms and intermedia agenda setting.