We participate at ECREA 2024 «Communication & social (dis)order» 10th European Communication Conference – University of Ljubljana
Faculty of Social Sciences – 24 – 27 September 2024 Slovenia with the paper: Lexicon and ties: affective polarization and networking practices among Italian fringe beliefs Telegram channels
Lexicon and ties: affective polarization and networking practices among Italian fringe beliefs Telegram channels
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.
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. 2022). In particular, the function of Telegram channels has been rapidly adopted for news broadcasting (Wijermars 2021). 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. 2022). What is still unclear and under-researched, is the relationship between such fringe platforms and the more visible and 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 (Gursky et al. 2022). 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 therq RQ1: how do practices and discourses of toxicity develop within fringe beliefs Telegram channels in Italy?
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 targets of hostility, 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 vocabularies, representations, and practices related to affective polarization in Telegram radicalized channels/groups, to provide a “Polarisation Glossary” useful for avoiding counter-measures that may lead to an escalation of distrust, uncivilty, and radicalization.
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