We participate at Convegno AssoComPol 2024 «The new European public sphere, the crises and challenges of “post truth”» Catania | Università di Catania | 30 May – 1 June 2024 with the paper: The fringe of the public sphere. Affective polarization and networking practices among Italian fringe beliefs Telegram channels
Abstract
The current landscape of digital platforms is characterized by a complex constellation of public, semi-public and private spaces. These spaces are heterogeneous in terms of visibility, regulation, and audiences, but also connected by mutual migration dynamics between fringe and mainstream environments that need to be studied in order to understand the contemporary communicative disorders.
According to de Winkel (2023), fringe platforms are described as alternative platform services created with the intention to critique the ideological foundations and practices of mainstream platform services. Furthermore, the author suggests fringe platforms should not be exclusively linked to extreme politics but encompass various technologies reflecting diverse ideologies. Fringe platforms, with a smaller user base, foster tighter ideological bonds, potentially exposing users to toxicity (Schulze et al. 2022) and spreading problematic content to mainstream media. In this sense, Telegram is perceived as a fringe space due to its flexibility in distributing problematic content through semi-public channels, closed groups, and chats. To some extent, the platform appears to function as a conduit for disseminating information across various networks and platforms, thus amplifying the reach of its content.
Since its creation in 2013, Telegram has positioned itself as an ideal space for those who yearn for privacy and security, an affordance that satisfies those who dream of a free internet, and for those who find themselves compelled to use such a space as the only safe way to coordinate (Urman and Katz 2022). Telegram from this point of view seems to be the ideal place to trace information and contexts in which conspiracy narratives are found to flourish (Schulze et al. 2022, Herasimenka et al. 2023). In particular, the function of Telegram channels has been rapidly adopted for news broadcasting (Wijermars 2022). Moreover, research conducted on Telegram has shown that, in spaces such as these, extreme fringes recruit users (Urman & Katz 2022); alt-right conspiracist groups coordinate (Walther and McCoy 2021), and in general, disinformation spreads (Herasimenka et al. 2023). What is still unclear and under-researched, is the relationship between what may be defined as “fringe platforms” and the more mainstream web spaces as well as legacy media. In other words, it is necessary to understand how the practices and languages developed in fringe platforms move outside of them, i.e. between upstream and downstream (Woolley 2022). In this regard, understanding this dynamic can be deemed necessary where the characteristics of today’s platformized public sphere are acknowledged. Indeed, studying Telegram entails investigating not only its peculiarities and technological infrastructure but rather its ideological and social ecosystem.
As part of an ongoing project (CORIT), funded by the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP) and concerning the development of narratives that are capable of “intoxicating” the Italian hybrid media system, this paper aims to answer two different research questions:
RQ1: how do practices and discourses of toxicity develop within fringe beliefs Telegram channels in Italy?
RQ2: whether and how these toxicity impact on the Italian public sphere?
To do so, starting from lists of Telegram channels/groups compiled by debunkers (i.e. list from BUTAC https://www.butac.it/the-black-list/) (Fletcher et al. 2017), it has been built a network of the main Italian Telegram channels and groups that disseminate problematic content through a snowballing method (Peeters & Willaert, 2022). Then, using a combination of ethnographic observation and scraping tools such as 4Cat and the Telethon Python library (Urman & Katz, 2020) we collected and analyzed 1) news posted and their comments, 2) the most frequent themes framed, 3) recurrent lexicons participating in affective polarization, which has been clustered through the Emotional Text Mining technique (Boccia Artieri et al. 2021). Results will focus on the representations and practices related to affective polarization in Telegram radicalized channels/groups as well as to provide an insight of the Telegram public sphere and its adherence/discrepancy with the Italian public sphere. Therefore, analysing Telegram as a fringe platform provides a new opportunity not only to understand its public debate, but also to recognize the influence of mainstream platforms themselves in shaping the interrelated public agenda and sphere (Bentivegna & Boccia Artieri 2020). Considering the online public sphere as an ecosystem of forces, analyzing the specificity of Telegram allows reflecting on the central themes of online democratic participation (Davis, 2021): the quality and/or toxicity of discourse, the balancing of information priorities, as well as the broader consequences of platformization in the developments of the Italian public sphere.
References
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