MAPPING ITALIAN NEWS MEDIA POLITICAL COVERAGE IN THE LEAD-UP OF 2018 GENERAL ELECTION | LARICA AT UNIVERSITÀ DI URBINO CARLO BO

Elezioni - 2018 Mapping Italian News

elezioni2018.news/blog/report

FULL REPORT Fabio Giglietto Laura Iannelli | Luca Rossi Augusto Valeriani | Nicola Righetti Francesca Carabini | Giada Marino Stefano Usai | Elisabetta Zurovac

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SUPPORTED BY A GRANT FROM THE FOUNDATION OPEN SOCIETY INSTITUTE IN COOPERATION WITH THE INFORMATION PROGRAM OF THE OPEN SOCIETY FOUNDATIONS Elezioni - 2018 Mapping Italian News

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This study was supported in part by a grant Permanent link: from the Foundation Open Society Institute in elezioni2018.news/blog/report cooperation with the Information Program of the Open Society Foundations. v 1.0 updated May 17, 2018

Authors Report Design and Layout: Fabio Giglietto*, Laura Iannelli**, Luca Rossi***, Guido Capanna Piscè Augusto Valeriani****, Nicola Righetti*, Francesca Carabini*, Giada Marino*, Stefano This work is licensed under the Usai*, Elisabetta Zurovac** Creative Commons Attribu- tion-ShareAlike 4.0 Internation- * Università di Urbino Carlo Bo, al License. ** Università di Sassari, *** IT University Copenhagen, To view a copy of this license, visit http:// **** Università di Bologna creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, Università di Urbino Carlo Bo - LaRiCA PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, Via Saffi 15 - 61029 - URBINO (PU) USA. [email protected]

MAPPING ITALIAN NEWS MEDIA POLITICAL COVERAGE IN THE LEAD-UP OF 2018 GENERAL ELECTION 2 Elezioni - 2018 Mapping Italian News

TABLE OF CONTENTS

01 | Executive Summary 04 Introduction 04 Overview of Methods 05 Key Takeaways 06

02 | Introduction 14

03 | Methods 20

04 | Structure and Content 22

05 | A Structural View of Partisan Media 28 Partisan Attention to Media Sources 28 The role of Facebook Metrics in Media Sources Partisan Attention 31 Controversial News Stories and Cross-partisan Engagement 38

06 | Media Coverage of Election Issues 47 Engaging days, engaging issues 48 The top 10 most engaging news in the lead up of the election 58 The online media coverage of political leaders 64 Top issues by leader 66 Case studies 71

07 | Appendix 1: Methods 81

08 | Appendix 2: Top 25 News 89

09 | Appendix 3: Top Media Sources 91

10 | Appendix 4: Classification of news stories 93

11 | Appendix 5: Overall statistics on Facebook reactions, 97 comments and shares

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Executive Summary

Introduction This study presents an analysis of the online media coverage in the run up of 2018 Italian General election. We illustrate how immigration, corruption and privileges of the elite – also related to a certain rhetoric on the inability of the state to protect the rights of the needy – were in fact the most salient topics throughout the months before and during the election. Both topics were largely central in both Salvini’s League and Di Maio’s Five Stars Movement agenda. Nevertheless, the leaders most frequently cited in online news articles were (PD) and (). By deep diving into the contents of main leaders media coverage and respective social media engagement we document the centrality of stories unravelling around leaders’ legal issues, alleged collusion and scandals.

While the media clusters emerging from the network analysis clearly resembles the tripartite structure of the contemporary Italian politics articulated in centre- left, centre-right and Five Stars Movement, the different weight and articulation within each cluster clearly describe the strengths of M5S and centre-right (largely dominated by the League) and the weakness of the centre-left.

While our analysis depicted a clear profile of the actors and topics that catalyzed the highest social media interactions and thus attention, we also illustrate a number of strategies employed by different communities to amplify the reach of contents aligned with own worldview while reframing negative coverage through comments. Overall, explicitly partisan and hyper-partisan sources catalyzed a significant share of the social media interactions performed by the online audience in the lead up of the election.

The analysis includes the evaluation and mapping of the Italian media landscape from several perspectives and is based on large-scale data collection of online news articles published on the web, shared and interacted on Facebook and Twitter.

MAPPING ITALIAN NEWS MEDIA POLITICAL COVERAGE IN THE LEAD-UP OF 2018 GENERAL ELECTION 4 Elezioni - 2018 Mapping Italian News

Overview of Methods

• Data collection of 84,815 news articles on Italian politics published between September 1 2017 and March 4 2018 (sources: Global Database of Society (GDELT), Google News, Twitter) with respective volume of Facebook interactions (reactions, comments and shares) observed every two hour for a week after publication (source: Facebook Graph API); • The interactions on media sources by users on Twitter and Facebook provides a broader perspective of the role and influence of media sources among people engaged in politics through social media; • The differential media sharing patterns of supporters of different Italian parties on Twitter enable a detailed analysis of the role of partisanship in the formation and function of media structures; • Content analysis using automated tools supports the tracking of topics over time among media sources; • Qualitative media analysis of individual cases studies enhances our understanding of media function, structure and patterns of partisan attention.

| LARICA AT UNIVERSITÀ DI URBINO CARLO BO | FULL REPORT 5 Elezioni - 2018 Mapping Italian News Key Takeaways Immigration and failures of the welfare system fostered by the shortage of resources allegedly caused by the privileges and corruption of the elite were two most widely covered and engaged substantive issue in the run up of March election

Immigration (also played in the context of a lack of security), the corruption and privileges of the elite, sometimes invoked as the main cause of the failures of the state to protect the rights of the needy (low-income individuals and families, unemployed, retired, elderly, affected by natural disasters), were in fact the most salient topics throughout the months before and during the campaign. The veement and sometime violent calls for a stronger and stricter immigration policy often sparkled the reactions of the supporter on the opposite side of the political spectrum resulting in harsh discussions originated by the allegation of incitement to violence, discrimination, racism and thus fascism. As the case of Luca Traini and its consequent events clearly pointed out, more than seventy years after the fall of the fascist dictatorship, the rhetoric that unravels around fascism and anti-fascism still plays an effective role in igniting divisive debates in the Italian society.

MAPPING ITALIAN NEWS MEDIA POLITICAL COVERAGE IN THE LEAD-UP OF 2018 GENERAL ELECTION 6 Elezioni - 2018 Mapping Italian News Key Takeaways Both the topic of immigration and lack of effective welfare caused by the privileges of the elite are played out in a context of an increasingly hybridizes media landscape

While this study is devoted to observe online media, it is important to underline that traditional media still plays a prominent role in the information diet of the Italian citizen and television is still the most popular source of news. The first and the second most engaging news stories in our dataset both relates to the popular Sanremo TV music festival (see Appendix 2: Top News). Furthermore, excerpts from TV shows are often consumed online. The popularity of these contents, testified by the volume of social media interactions originated around websites such as “Informazione Vera” (True Information) that mainly publishes political video excerpts from TV shows often accompanied by clickbait titles, speaks by itself about the hybridization of the contemporary Italian mediascape (see Appendix 3: Top 25 sources).

| LARICA AT UNIVERSITÀ DI URBINO CARLO BO | FULL REPORT 7 Elezioni - 2018 Mapping Italian News Key Takeaways Within the centre-right coalition the online partisan audience close to Salvini’s League outperformed those of Berlusconi’s Forza Italia

At the same time, three of the free-to-air and several digital TV channels are still part of the powerful media empire Mediaset directly or indirectly controlled by the leader of Forza Italia, Silvio Berlusconi. Under this perspective, it is striking to observe the low number of online media sources adjudicated to Forza Italia via the Multi Party Media Partisanship Attention Score (MP-MPAS). While the MP-MPAS does not directly measure the political leaning of a news media source but instead the attention it received by the online supporters of a political party, it is worth to note that the most prominent online media sources of Berlusconi’s empire (Il Giornale, TGcom24) have been mostly adjudicated to Salvini’s League. Speaking about the overall media ecosystem, it’s interesting to add that around one month after the election, Mediaset decided to fire the hosts of three political shows aired by their free-to-air channels. While the official motivation was the low ratings reported by these shows, many political observers argued that the firings were instead politically motivated by the show being biased toward Salvini’s League.

MAPPING ITALIAN NEWS MEDIA POLITICAL COVERAGE IN THE LEAD-UP OF 2018 GENERAL ELECTION 8 Elezioni - 2018 Mapping Italian News Key Takeaways The overall social media attention toward news media sources adjudicated to M5S was only slightly outperformed by the cross-partisan category that includes traditional newspapers such as , La Stampa, Corriere.it.

Both our Twitter and Facebook data clearly point out that the online activism of both League and Five Stars Movement’ supporters successfully shifted the agenda toward certain news stories and the attention toward certain media sources. League has in fact the highest number of media sources adjudicated while the sources in the M5S’ category gathered the highest volume of overall Facebook interactions. The overall social media attention toward sources adjudicated to M5S was only slightly outperformed by the cross-partisan category that includes brands such as La Repubblica, La Stampa, Corriere.it and other major mainstream media players. Furthermore, the attention toward sources in the M5S category is concentrated on the official news channels of the Movement: ilblogdellestelle.it and beppegrillo.it.

Similarly, the media coverage around the four main leaders pinpoint a disproportionate social media engagement around , despite the relatively low media attention he received. The volume of engagement around the 7,000 news stories mentioning M5S’s leader almost matches the volume of interactions collected by the over 11,000 stories mentioning Matteo Renzi.

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MAPPING ITALIAN NEWS MEDIA POLITICAL COVERAGE IN THE LEAD-UP OF 2018 GENERAL ELECTION 10 Elezioni - 2018 Mapping Italian News Key Takeaways Overall, explicitly partisan and hyper-partisan sources catalyzed a significant share of the social media interactions performed by the online audience in the lead up of the election

Officially, explicitly or blatantly partisan media sources appear, in fact, multiple time in the lists of most popular news sources (see Appendix 3). Three sources particularly problematic made to the list of top 25 URLs with one entry: llfatto.it, italia24ore.com and inews24.it. llfatto.it Three sources particularly attempts to mislead the reader starting problematic made to the list of from its domain name that resembles top 25 URLs with one entry: llfatto. ilfattoquotidiano.it. In the information it, italia24ore.com and inews24.it. section of the website it is clearly stated that some of their news stories may be inaccurate of completely made up. Nevertheless, the article they published the day before the election stating that 500,000 fake vote ballots with the Partito Democratico logo have supposedly been discovered in was widely shared on Facebook during the election day and it is the 6th most engaged URL in our entire dataset. Italia24ore.com perfectly represents the category of for profit “fake news” and its most popular article, claiming that a senator was slaughtered by two unemployed, made to 17th position of the most engaging URLs. Finally, inews24.it, as surfaced by an investigation published on November 21, 2017 by BuzzFeed, is part of a fringe network of websites and Facebook pages well known for spreading anti-immigrant news and misinformation. Following BuzzFeed’ revelations, two Inews24 Facebook pages (nearly 1.5 million followers at the time) have been removed by the platform’ administrators. Nevertheless, an inews24 rip-off of an article published by the local newspaper Cronache Maceratesi few hours before discussing the inability of the State to provide an accommodation for an old women affected by the earthquake, also made to the list of most popular news stories.

| LARICA AT UNIVERSITÀ DI URBINO CARLO BO | FULL REPORT 11 Elezioni - 2018 Mapping Italian News Key Takeaways Several strategies were employed to amplify the reach of contents aligned with own worldview while criticizing negative coverage. Of the three signals we observed, shares and reactions served the first goal and comments the second.

Of those types of interactions, reactions are the most common, followed by comments and shares. The three signals are highly correlated, with comments being the less correlated with the Of those types of interactions, others. Given these regularities, we reactions are the most common, focused our attention on news stories followed by comments and and media sources showing an odd shares. The three signals are ratio between shares and comments. highly correlated... As clearly pointed out by the second chapter of this report, news stories with a negative coverage of the Five Stars Movement or positive coverage of Renzi and Berlusconi tend to share a common pattern characterized by a significantly higher proportion of comments over shares. On the contrary, negative coverage of the rivals and positive coverage of the Movement, starting from news stories published by their official party channels, tend to receive an higher volume of shares over comments.

MAPPING ITALIAN NEWS MEDIA POLITICAL COVERAGE IN THE LEAD-UP OF 2018 GENERAL ELECTION 12 Elezioni - 2018 Mapping Italian News Key Takeaways

The strategy thus seems to consists in an attempt to reframe a negative news story not aligned with the party views by means of massive interventions in the comments of the social media post. The goal is to exploit Facebook algorithm that pushes most interacted content to the top, in order to show opinions contradicting those expressed in the news story first.

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Introduction On March 4, 2018, went to the polls to elect 630 members of the Chamber of Deputies and 315 elective members of the Senate of the Republic. While confirming a longstanding decreasing trend, the turnout (73%) marked only a slight drop compared to the 2013 elections. Three main political parties and coalitions competed, without success, to reach the threshold of 40% of votes required by the the new electoral law in order the win the majority of seats in both chambers. With the 37% of votes, the centre-right alliance, formed by Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia (FI), ’s League (LEGA) and ’s (FdI), won a plurality of seats in both chambers. The Five Stars Movement (M5S) led by Luigi Di Maio become the party with the largest share of votes (32%). The centre left coalition lead by Matteo Renzi and formed by the (PD), Together (an alliance formed by the green and socialists parties named INSIEME), More Europe (+EUROPA) and Popular Civic List (CP), come third with 23% of votes.

While the no majority result was largely expected, March elections resulted in a radically altered equilibrium of power between the main political actors and within the coalitions and a sharply While the no majority result was divided country. Salvini’s League (17% largely expected, March elections of votes, +13%) and Di Maio’s Five Stars resulted in a radically altered Movement (+6%), both often described equilibrium of power between the as populist and anti-establishment, main political actors and within significantly increased their share of the coalitions and a sharply votes and parliamentary seats. On the divided country. other hand, Forza Italia (14% of votes, -7.5%) and the Democratic Party (-6.5%) were the big losers. Mimicking the longstanding sharp socio-economic divide between the south and north of the country, votes casted on March 4 clustered geographically with the south of the country largely dominated by the Five Stars Movement and the north by a Centre-right where the League, formerly Northern League, played a key role (see Figure 8).

MAPPING ITALIAN NEWS MEDIA POLITICAL COVERAGE IN THE LEAD-UP OF 2018 GENERAL ELECTION 14 Elezioni - 2018 Mapping Italian News

In this report we explore the dynamics of the election by analyzing over 80,000 news stories related to Italian politics, published by approximately 4,000 news sources between September 1, 2017 and 04 March, 2018. For each news story we measured, every two hours and for a week after publication, the volume of Facebook interactions - namely comments, reactions (likes and the additional reactions added by Facebook on February 2016) and shares received. Additionally we also measured how often each sources were shared on Twitter. We used Facebook data to identify what was highly salient and Twitter data to depict the relationships among different media, stories and Twitter users.

The report is structured in three parts. The first part analyzes the relationships between the different media sources. The second builds upon the partisan attention devoted to different media source to illustrate the relationships between stories, media sources, main political parties and politicians. Finally, the third section dives deep into content by highlighting the most salient topics of the political campaign overall and in relation to different political leaders.

The electoral success of Salvini’s League and Di Maio’s Five Stars Movement, both often labeled as populist parties, is clearly mirrored both by the social media popularity of news sources aligned with their views and by the salience of topics at the centre of their political discourses.

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Matteo Salvini successfully transformed the image of a party focused on defending the rights of the economically productive north against the “widespread” corruption of Rome government and the south, to that of an extreme right-wing party defending the rights of the against “the invasion” of immigrants and thus potentially appealing to voters across the entire country. Luigi Di Maio and the other M5S’ leaders also attempted to present the Five Stars Movements under a new light. Anti-establishment stances such as the critics to Nato, Euro and the European Union (until Brexit the M5S formed a group with the UKIP in the European Parliament) were all smoothed in the attempt to avoid being labeled as extremists. In a post-ideological political program where tax cuts and public debt reduction happily coexist, the proposal for a universal basic income - supposedly funded by cuts to politicians’ privileges and savings from the fights against corruption, strongly characterized M5S campaign.

Immigration, the corruption and privileges of the elite often invoked as the main cause of the failures of the state to protect the rights of the needy (low- income individuals and families, unemployed, retired, elderly, affected by natural disasters), were in fact the most salient topics throughout the months before and during the campaign. The veement and sometime violent calls for a stronger and stricter immigration policy often sparkled the reactions of the supporter on the opposite side of the political spectrum resulting in harsh discussions originated by the allegation of incitement to violence, discrimination, racism and thus fascism. As the case of Luca ... more than seventy years after Traini clearly pointed out (see case the fall of the fascist dictatorship, study on Matteo Salvini), more than the rhetoric that unravels around seventy years after the fall of the fascist fascism and anti-fascism still dictatorship, the rhetoric that unravels plays an effective role in igniting around fascism and anti-fascism still divisive debates in the Italian plays an effective role in igniting divisive society. debates in the Italian society.

Both the main topics are played out in a context of an increasingly hybridizes media landscape. While this study is devoted to observe online media, it is important to underline that traditional media still plays a prominent role in the information diet of the Italian citizen. Television is still the most popular source of news. The first and the second most engaging news story in our dataset both relates to the popular Sanremo TV music festival (see Appendix 2: Top News). Furthermore, excerpts from TV shows are often consumed online. The popularity of these contents, testified by the volume of social media interactions originated around websites such as “Informazione Vera” (True Information) that mainly publishes political video excerpts from TV shows often accompanied by clickbait titles, speaks by itself about the hybridization of the contemporary Italian mediascape (see Appendix 3: Top 25 sources).

MAPPING ITALIAN NEWS MEDIA POLITICAL COVERAGE IN THE LEAD-UP OF 2018 GENERAL ELECTION 16 Elezioni - 2018 Mapping Italian News

At the same time, three of the free-to-air and several digital TV channels are still part of the powerful media empire Mediaset directly or indirectly controlled by the leader of Forza Italia, Silvio Berlusconi. Under this perspective, it is striking to observe the low number of online media sources adjudicated to Forza Italia via the Multi Party Media Partisanship Attention Score (MP-MPAS). While the MP-MPAS does not directly measure the political leaning of a news media source but instead the attention it received by supporters of a political party, it is worth to note that the most prominent online media sources of Berlusconi’s empire (Il Giornale, TGcom24) have been mostly adjudicated to Salvini’s League. Speaking about the overall media ecosystem, it’s interesting to add that around one month after the election, Mediaset decided to fire the hosts of three political shows aired by their free-to-air channels. While the official motivation was the low ratings reported by these shows, many political observers argued that the firings were instead politically motivated by the show being biased toward Salvini’s League1.

Both our Twitter and Facebook data clearly point out that the online activism of both League and Five Stars Movement’ supporters successfully shifted the agenda toward certain news stories and the attention toward certain media sources. Lega has in fact the highest number of media source adjudicated while the sources in the M5S’ category gathered the highest volume of overall Facebook interactions. The overall social media attention toward sources adjudicated to M5S was only slightly outperformed by the cross-partisan category that includes brands such as La Repubblica, La Stampa, Corriere.it and other major mainstream media players. Furthermore, the attention toward sources in the M5S category is concentrated on the official news channels of the Movement: ilblogdellestelle.it and beppegrillo.it.

Overall, explicitly partisan and hyper- Overall, explicitly partisan and partisan sources catalyzed a significant hyper-partisan sources catalyzed share of the social media interactions a significant share of the social performed by the online audience in media interactions performed by the lead up of the election. Officially, the online audience in the lead up explicitly or blatantly partisan media of the election. sources appear, in fact, multiple time in the lists of most popular news sources (see Appendix 3). Three particularly problematic media sources made to the list of top 25 URLs with one entry: llfatto.it, italia24ore.com and inews24.it. llfatto.it attempts to mislead the reader starting from its domain name that resembles ilfattoquotidiano.it. In the information section of the website it is clearly stated that some of their news stories may be inaccurate of completely made up. Nevertheless, the article they

1 See http://www.liberoquotidiano.it/news/politica/13325832/paolo-del-debbio- maurizio-belpietro-allontanati-rete-4-panico-forza-italia-silvio-berlusconi-prepara-nuova- campagna-elettorale-tornare-voto.html (in Italian).

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published the day before the election stating that 500,000 fake vote ballots with the Partito Democratico logo have supposedly been discovered in Sicily was widely shared on Facebook during the election day and it is the 6th most engaged URL in our entire dataset. Italia24ore.com perfectly represents the category of for profit “fake news” and its most popular article, claiming that a senator was beaten by two unemployed, made to 17th position of the most engaging URLs. Finally, inews24.it, as surfaced by an investigation published on November 21, 2017 by BuzzFeed2, is part of a fringe network of websites and Facebook pages well known for spreading anti-immigrant news and misinformation. Following BuzzFeed’ revelations, two Inews24 Facebook pages (nearly 1.5 million followers at the time) have been removed by the platform’ administrators. Nevertheless, an inews24 rip-off of an article published by the local newspaper Cronache Maceratesi few hours before discussing the inability of the State to provide an accommodation for an old women affected by the earthquake, also made to the list of most popular news stories.

While less productive than mainstream media in terms of the number of news articles published (URLs), these partisan sources tend to gather, on an average article, a comparable and sometimes higher number of Facebook interactions than professional journalistic organizations. The combination of these two factors made it difficult to properly estimate the reach (not to speak about the impact) of the entire category of website producing problematic information3 compared to contents produced by mainstream media4. By looking at the overall volume of Facebook interactions, mainstream media clearly dominates also thanks to the significantly higher volume of articles published. By looking instead at the average volume of interactions per article, “alternative media” dominates often due to the wide popularity of one or two articles over a relatively small set of news stories published. At the same time, even the apparently simple activity of categorizing news sources according to the distinction mainstream/ alternative online media is extremely challenging and almost impossible to be carried out if not as a result of an in depth analysis of each article, website and respective social media presence. Furthermore, beside the cases that made to the top sources and URLs, it is reasonable to expect that the bulk of problematic contents are concentrated in the long tail of news story getting moderate to low attention. As pointed out by the so called long tail theory, the cumulated attention of a large number of these stories can outperform the attention of a

2 See https://www.buzzfeed.com/albertonardelli/one-of-the-biggest-alternative-media- networks-in-italy-is. 3 An umbrella term that includes misinformation, disinformation, propaganda and attempts to sow confusion and distraction in the public opinion (see Jack, C. (2017). Lexicon of Lies: Terms for Problematic Information. Data & Society. Retrieved from https://datasociety.net/ output/lexicon-of-lies/). 4 An attempt in this direction was carried on by a study conducted by a team of researcher at the Reuters Institute of the Oxford University (https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/ our-research/measuring-reach-fake-news-and-online-disinformation-europe). The findings concerning Facebook interactions are however contradictory.

MAPPING ITALIAN NEWS MEDIA POLITICAL COVERAGE IN THE LEAD-UP OF 2018 GENERAL ELECTION 18 Elezioni - 2018 Mapping Italian News single very popular news story. For this reasons the reach of these contents are always at risk of being both overestimated and underestimated.

Finally, thanks to the way the study was conceived, this report shed some light on one of the gordian nodes of most recent online news studies. While our analysis depicted a clear profile of the actors and topics that catalyzed the highest social media interactions and thus attention, we are well aware that these numbers may be artificially inflated by a wide range of legitimate and fringe “attention hacking” interventions (advertising campaigns, coordinated actions of large communities, bots and fake accounts)5. From organized and/ or automatic efforts to push an hashtag to trend on Twitter, to those aimed at maximizing the visibility of certain contents or comments under popular social media posts, recent electoral campaigns all around the world teaches us that this techniques are effective and increasingly common. This practices must be understood as a part of a strategy ... we are well aware that these aimed at manipulating the media and numbers may be artificially in turn the public opinion. Journalists, inflated by a wide range of in fact, increasingly relies on attention legitimate and fringe “attention data (traffic toward certain news stories, hacking” interventions ... trending Twitter hashtags or Google keywords, popular social media contents, ...) to formulate a quick guess on the sentiment of the public opinion on certain topics. Attention data – after all – are easily available, faster and cheaper than opinion polls. The various actors aiming at manipulate the media are well aware of that and thus constantly at work to serve the media salacious newsworthy not-necessarily-real stories (think about the PizzaGate) backing certain worldviews6 in the hope to trick the media in amplyinfing its reach. In their recent study, Julia Ebner and Jacob Davey documented that, in the run up of the 2018 election, “several Italian extreme-right groups were organising” – also in connection with international boards such as 4chan and 8chan – “on the Telegram chat application, sharing materials, memes and coordinating their strategic communication efforts to influence the election outcome in favour of League and the Brothers of Italy”7. In their upcoming report of the March election, the EU DisinfoLab, also scrutinized at least two attempts to employ similar techniques to push fabricated contents on Twitter8. Altrought lacking the sophistication and thus the efficacy of other attempts staged in the run-up to other elections, the traces of media manipulation activities reported by these studies should raise concerns toward the impulse to simply translate the high volume of interactions we observed

5 See https://points.datasociety.net/hacking-the-attention-economy-9fa1daca7a37. 6 See Marwick, A., & Lewis, R. (2017). Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online. Data & Society. Retrieved from https://datasociety.net/pubs/oh/DataAndSociety_ MediaManipulationAndDisinformationOnline.pdf. 7 Ebner, J., & Davey, J. (2018). MAINSTREAMING MUSSOLINI How the Extreme Right Attempted to “Make Italy Great Again” in the 2018 Italian Election. Institute for Strategic Dialogue. 8 See https://twitter.com/DisinfoEU_IT.

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around certain topics, media sources and political actors to the sentiment of the Italian public opinion.

Under this perspective, the granularity of data we collected through our study allow us to back the idea that certain strategies were employed to amplify the reach of contents aligned with own worldview while criticizing negative coverage. Of the three signals we observed, shares and reactions served the first goal and comments the second. Of those types of interactions, reactions are the most common followed by comments and shares. The three signals are highly correlated, with comments being the less correlated with the others. Given these regularities, we focused our attention on news stories showing an odd ratio between shares and comments. As clearly pointed out by the second chapter of this report, news stories with a negative coverage of the Five Stars Movement or positive coverage of Renzi and Berlusconi tend to share a common pattern characterized by a significantly higher proportion of comments over shares. On the contrary, positive coverage of the Movement, starting from news stories published by their official party channels, tend to receive an higher volume of shares over comments. The strategy thus consists in attempting to reframe a negative news story not aligned with the party views by means of massive interventions in the comments of the social media post. The goal is to exploit Facebook algorithm that pushes most interacted content to the top, in order to show opinions contradicting those expressed in the news story first.

Methods In this study we analyze online media coverage of the 2018 Italian general election over the 6 months from September 2017 until the election in March 2018. This study builds upon, adapts and extends a methodology and approach developed in prior efforts to study online media during political campaigns9. Drawing on a variety of analytical approaches and data sources, we track the role of media sources and actors that participate in the public debate; estimate the network structure of the media sphere with particular attention to the formation of political communities; and measure the evolution and prominence of different topics, agendas, and frames over time.

We primarily rely upon data collected from three different sources: Global Database of Society (GDELT), Google News and Twitter. Using this three sources we collected over 80,000 news stories from a broad range of media sites, campaign sites, government sites, private firms and blogs. For each news story, we collected every two hour and for a week after publication the volume

9 Faris, R., Roberts, H., Etling, B., Bourassa, N., Zuckerman, E., & Benkler, Y. (2017). Partisanship, Propaganda, and Disinformation: Online Media and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. Retrieved from https://papers.ssrn.com/ sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3019414

MAPPING ITALIAN NEWS MEDIA POLITICAL COVERAGE IN THE LEAD-UP OF 2018 GENERAL ELECTION 20 Elezioni - 2018 Mapping Italian News of interactions (comments, shares and reactions) generated around the news article on the entire Facebook platform (source: Facebook Graph API). We analyzed this corpus of stories using text mining, named entity recognition and cluster analysis for topic detection and quanti-qualitative content analysis for in depth analysis of relevant cases. For each news story, we collected Beside the dataset of news stories with every two hour and for a week respective Facebook engagement, after publication the volume of we also collected and analyzed two interactions (comments, shares additional Twitter datasets. Using and reactions) generated around Twitter Enterprise search API via the news article on the entire DiscoverText, we collected the retweets Facebook platform ... of Italian politicians and political parties during January 2018 (N=216,765). Using DMI-TCAT we also followed the Twitter timelines of the top 5,000 contributors in the retweet dataset and collected tweets published by this users between February 1 and the March 4, 2018 (N=4,385,877). We extracted and resolved the nearly 1.3 million URLs that were shared by these tweets to estimate the network structure of the different media sources and measure the attention devoted to different sources by partisan Twitter users. More specifically, to study the interaction of partisanship and media, we adapted the candidate-focused partisanship attention score derived from the sharing patterns of Twitter users who retweeted Trump and Clinton10, to the Italian political context. We thus developed by adaptation a party-focused partisanship attention score derived from the sharing patterns of Twitter users who retweeted the official Twitter account of a set of Italian politicians and political parties. These scores allow us to identify and describe patterns of attention to different media sources from supporters of the different parties.

Further details on the methods are included in the text of this report and a more detailed methodological appendix.

10 See note 1.

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Structure and Content The Twitter network of the media sources shared during the election campaign and pre-campaign allows several insights into the structure of Italian online media system and its political partisanship. The figures presented in this section represent the result of a projected bi-partite network that connected Twitter users to media sources they had shared on Twitter. Through the process of projection, two sources that were shared by the same users were connected and the user removed. In the resulting networks then, media sources are connected when they have been shared by the same Twitter user. In the context of figures 9 to 12, the structure of the network (the connections among the nodes) is defined by the users sharing activity while the political leaning of the media sources (the color of the nodes) is defined according to the process of adjudication of media sources to political parties described in the methods section. Moreover, each figure shows the size of the nodes according to a different Facebook metric: Total Facebook of interactions (Figure 9), Facebook Comments (Figure 10), Facebook Shares (Figure 11) and Reactions (Figure 12). This aggregate metrics results from the sum of interactions gathered by each news stories published by a certain media source over the entire period of observation.

The Twitter network of media sources shows a relative clustered structure with the nodes polarized around three major areas corresponding to three different parties: Five Stars Movement (yellow), Democratic Party (pink), League (Blue). Beside these three main political actors, there is a group of sources that are coloured in gray and that are unassigned to a specific political party since they have been shared by a politically heterogeneous audience.

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In the following we will refer to these sources as “Cross-partisan” sources. Figure 9 shows the size of nodes proportional to the total number of the Facebook interaction of the sources. This visualization gives a good overview of the main actors and it is interesting to observe how the number of large nodes (those able to attract a higher number of Facebook interactions) is different between different types of political polarization. The area connected with the Five Stars Movement (M5S) has at least 4 major actors: Il Fatto Quotidiano – newspaper that has always been perceived “friendly” toward the M5S – , beppegrillo.it and ilblogdellestelle.it – two official websites of the M5S, and fanpage.it – a website that, during the election campaign, released an extensive reportage about illegal dumping of waste in the region of allegedly involving several notable politicians of the Democratic Party. The area of the network associated with the Democratic Party (and partially with the left-leaning “Free and Equals”) is not characterized by any major media source but it rather show a cohese network of minor sources. The blue part of the network, dominated by sources shared by users leaning toward the political position of the League, sees a central role of the newspaper Il Giornale and of TgCom24, news service of Mediaset. Beside these two actors, a notable role is played by the website Ilpopulista.it (The populist) a recently started news- oriented website who’s co-director is Matteo Salvini himself, the leader of the League.

Beside the exception of Il Fatto Beside the exception of Il Fatto Quotidiano and Il Giornale, almost all Quotidiano and Il Giornale, almost the major newspapers are labeled as all the major newspapers are cross-partisan sources and colored in labeled as cross-partisan sources grey. Nevertheless, we can use the nodes’ and colored in grey. relative position within the network to understand more in details the actual ideological position of the sources. In this respect, it is worth keeping in mind that while the political leaning of the media sources is defined through the political leaning of the users who shared news from that sources, the position of the news sources within the network is defined by a force-based layout algorithm11 that groups together nodes that are highly interconnected. This means that, bearing in mind the threshold introduced in the process of adjudication of political leaning (see Appendix 1: Methods), the network visualization allows a more fine grained picture of the Italian media sphere. By looking at the position of the node within the network, it is in fact possible to distinguish within the group of cross-partisan media sources (colored in grey) those more frequently associated with other sources with a clear political leaning. This seems to be the case with La Repubblica, a newspaper that traditionally has been associated with center-left political positions and that happened to be shared by a politically cross-partisan audience while, at

11 See Jacomy, M. (2009). Force-atlas graph layout algorithm. URL: http://gephi. org/2011/ forceatlas2-the-new-version-of-our-home-brew-layout.

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the same time, clearly positioned within the part of the network dominated by center-left sources. In a similar way, Il Corriere della Sera and La Stampa, are shared by cross-partisan audiences but the first is more frequently co-shared with sources leaning toward the M5S and the latter is positioned between the Democratic party’s and the League’s parts of the network. The combination of adjudication and position within the network, also explains the lack The combination of adjudication of significant hubs in the centre-left and position within the network, area of the visualization and speaks also explains the lack of significant about the different degree of insularity hubs in the centre-left area ... within the network. While the issues of partisanship and insularity are analyzed in the next chapter, the hypothesis emerging from the visualization suggest that certain media sources bridged different communities while others remained confined within the boundary of certain groups.

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Figure 10, Figure 11 and Figure 12 show the same network as Figure 9 but visualizing the size of the nodes proportional to the total volume of comments

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and shares received by the source on Facebook. It is interesting to observe how the main actors are stable as well as the relative differences among them. Nevertheless there is a significant difference that can be better observed in Figure 13. Comments, reactions and shares contributed in a similar amount Comments, reactions and shares to the overall number of Facebook contributed in a similar amount interactions for all the main media to the overall number of Facebook sources with the notable exception interactions for all the main of ilblogdellestelle.it and beppegrillo. media sources with the notable it. Those two sources are not, in fact, exception of ilblogdellestelle.it newspaper of news organizations but and beppegrillo.it. are the official and pseudo-official online presence of the M5S. It is interesting to observe how in these cases reactions and shares contributes much more than comments to the overall volume of Facebook interactions. A preliminary interpretation of this suggests that traditional newspapers, as well as news organizations such as ANSA or the Huffington Post Italia, receive large part of their Facebook interactions from debates and comments between readers while blogs such as beppegrillo.it or ilblogdellestelle.it seem to host a minor level of debate.

One last element worth discussing from the analysis of the network is the modular structure of the networked media system. It is worth remembering that in Figures 9 to 12 the colours of the nodes is not the result of the connections existing within the nodes, but of the political leaning of the source defined using the political leaning of the users who shared the source. For this reason,

MAPPING ITALIAN NEWS MEDIA POLITICAL COVERAGE IN THE LEAD-UP OF 2018 GENERAL ELECTION 26 Elezioni - 2018 Mapping Italian News those visualizations leave unanswered the question if also the structure of the network – the connection of co-sharing existing between two media sources – represents the tripolar political system that emerged from the election. Figure 14 addresses this question and shows the network visualizing the results of a community detection method based on modularity optimization12. Modularity optimization approaches to community detection identify a specific community structure such that the proposed clusters of nodes (modules) will contain nodes with dense connections between the nodes within the same module but sparse connections with nodes in different modules. It is interesting to observe how this approach results into exactly three communities that are largely overlapping with the groups labelled according to the political leaning. Within this perspective the validity of the sources political leaning is confirmed by the analysis of the network structure.

Following the insights suggested by the broad pictures of the networked media system, next chapter presents a detailed analysis based on the political leaning of the news media sources. In light of this analysis, it also provides a further explanation of the peculiar ratio between comments and shares pinpointed in this chapter.

12 Blondel, V. D., Guillaume, J. L., Lambiotte, R., & Lefebvre, E. (2008). Fast unfolding of communities in large networks. Journal of statistical mechanics: theory and experiment, 2008(10), P10008.

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A Structural View of Partisan Media

Partisan Attention to Media Sources As anticipated in the methods section and described in full details in Appendix 1, the Multi Party Media Partisanship Attention Score (MP-MPAS) is an alignment score that measures the partisan leaning of a media source. In this chapter, we focus on the niches that political actors occupied with reference to specific media outlets, assessing their relevance through the different Facebook metrics (reactions, comments, shares) that compose our dataset.

We start by showing (Figure 15) how each of the ten most engaging media sources identified during the election campaign scored in term of media partisanship attention. It should be noted that our score is not comprehensive of all the Italian political actors, since it focuses exclusively on political parties having an independent group in Parliament and at least one partisan media source assigned. Media sources have been associated to the political party having obtained the higher partisan attention score on that specific source. However, we have subsequently classified as “Cross-partisan” all the sources for which none of the parties we have considered has a score higher or equal to 0.33 (which thus represents our attribution threshold).

Figure 15 clearly shows that, throughout the months leading to the election, Five Stars Movement’s supporters have been highly active in sharing news stories from partisan (ilblogdellestelle.it, beppegrillo.it) as well as mainstream (such as fanpage.it) media sources, strongly polarizing the sharing activities around these sources. Also supporters of the League have been very active in sharing news stories during the campaign: while they have been able to “dominate” the sharing activity (by reaching the attribution threshold) around only one of the ten most engaging sources (i.e. ilgiornale.it), League scores either first or second in all of the ten sources considered. The sharing activity of League’s supporters have been thus more evenly distributed among different sources compared with the one of Five Stars Movement’s people, whose activity was more concentrated around a handful of sources.

Conversely the political party that seems to be most disadvantaged by the election campaign news media system was Forza Italia, which was not able to even reach the 0.1 threshold in any of the ten sources considered in Figure 15. However, we have to mention that Forza Italia leader, Silvio Berlusconi, has opened his Twitter account just in October 2017, thus being disadvantaged in terms of social media exposure and news coverage. Considering that this index is based on how frequently media sources were shared by users who retweeted posts from Italian political parties or candidates, the communication strategies and news coverage on Twitter turned out to be relevant in the Multi Party Media

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Partisanship Attention Score index building. Free and Equal effort is similar, but slightly better than Forza Italia one. In this case, the party exposure on Twitter could be influenced by the handicap of being a new political subject, even though it has been founded by long experience politicians. The Democratic Party effort also was not brilliant, in particular considering that it was not able to even reach the threshold score of Repubblica, traditionally the news media outlet nearest to the center-left wing.

Figure 16 considers the subset of sources13 we have included in our Multi Party Media Partisanship Attention Score study (N=628), attributing them to the eight political parties considered when the attribution threshold has been reached, while assigning a source to the “Cross-partisan” group when this is not the case. This broad picture confirms what has already emerged from the analysis of the top 10 sources: the League ranks first in term of sources attributed (i.e. whose articles have been dominantly shared by League supporters), followed by cross- partisan media and by the Five Stars Movement sources. Conversely, the left and center-left parties (Democratic Party, Free and Equal, Power to the People, Insieme and +Europa) have been attributed a much more limited number of sources. Finally Forza Italia, in spite of its long-standing presence and relevance within the Italian party system and its decent performance in the 2018 election (14% of the votes) has been assigned a residual number of sources (4), the same

13 To understand in-depth how the media sources were selected, see the Appendix 1.

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number obtained by Power to the People, a newborn and electorally marginal political actor.

Let’s now focus on levels of engagement (as the sum of reactions, shares and comments) obtained on Facebook by the sources attributed to each political actor. As can be observed in Figure 17, sources attributed to the Five Stars Movement and those that we classified as Cross-partisan have been able to generate a similar level of engagement outperforming all other sources. Conversely, media sources having attracted a dominant attention from supporters of the League, in spite of being a larger number (Figure 17) had a more limited Facebook engagement performance, at least in aggregate terms. Finally, sources associated to the Democratic Party and Free and Equal generated a residual number of interactions compared with top three and media sources assigned to Forza Italia collected less Facebook total interactions than Power to the People, a very young far-left political subject.

Taken together all these findings suggests that media sources having captured the attention of supporters of the League party have produced a great amount of news stories during the election campaign, but such productivity did not generate the same level of engagement generated by the less productive sources patrolled by Five Stars Movements activists.

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The role of Facebook Metrics in Media Sources Partisan Attention Let’s now focus specifically on different means of Facebook engagement by unpacking the data presented in Figure 17. For each clusters of sources we in first place selected the top ten based on total interactions. Tables 1 to 3 show how these top sources performed in term of single metrics (reactions, comments and shares). A bird eye observation of these data shows that the distribution of different metrics is highly uneven with reactions representing in general the preferred mean of interaction, followed by comments, while sharing activity is more limited. Interestingly, however, this pattern is disconfirmed for some of the sources attributed to the Five Stars Movement.

Looking at sources that have been attributed to the League (Table 1) it can be observed that top sites are predominantly mainstream news media or large media organizations, owned or related to Berlusconi’s family business, such as tgcom24.mediaset.it, a Mediaset all-news channel. In this cluster however, we can also notice two hyper-partisan14 media sources, such as ilpopulista.it and piovegovernoladro.info. The interactions distribution follows the general trend described above, in which reactions is the most common mean of engagement, and appears homogeneously distributed, without any relevant outlier.

The League Reactions Comments Shares Media Sources Count Count Count

ilgiornale.it 1.770,618 849,093 327,831

tgcom24.mediaset.it 869,009 335,006 120,086

ilpopulista.it 760,276 299,776 100,738

affaritaliani.it 394,634 192,059 88,914

secoloditalia.it 279,715 136,223 63,587

piovegovernoladro.info 203,332 142,040 64,999

m.ilgiornale.it 198,515 86,592 42,597

mobile.ilsole24ore.com 159,776 88,868 66,983

14 Hyper-partisan source means media outlets extremely biased in favor of a political party. In the last ten years the right-wing have taken advantages from this kind of extensive information network. In US, in particular during the 2016 election campaign, Breitbart was the core of this news ecosystem. See Marwick, A., & Lewis, R. (2017). Media manipulation and disinformation online. New York: Data & Society Research Institute.

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Reactions Comments Shares Media Sources Count Count Count

liberoquotidiano.it 173,971 66,443 38,764

ilprimatonazionale.it 167,623 73,244 36,239 Table 1: Media sources from the League party with most Facebook reactions, comments and shares

A look to the Five Stars Movement cluster (Table 2) reveals how, especially the top sources, have been characterized by a massive amount of interactions. The media sources attributed to the Five Stars Movement are pretty heterogeneous, with a prevalence of hyperpartisan sites (5stellenews.com, silenziefalsita.it, and informazionevera.it). The cluster, however, is dominated by ilfattoquotidiano. it, a mainstream newspaper whose positions are close to the M5S, and other mainstream outlets are included in the list, namely fanpage.it, which is an online news organization, ilmattino.it and video.corriere.it, which are the websites of two news media organizations, and espresso.repubblica.it, a magazine which is part of the same publishing group of La Repubblica newspaper.

Within the M5S cluster there are three cases in which the shares’ count is higher than the comments’ one. The first two cases are ilblogdellestelle.it – the official party’s website –, and beppegrillo.it – which is official blog. The third one, instead, is 5stellenews.com, an unofficial news media site integrated into the Five Stars Movement blogs universe. Ilblogdellestelle.it and beppegrillo.it are the only two media sources in which the shares count is significantly higher than the comments count, about the double for ilblogdellestelle.it. This finding, which stand against the general patterns described above, seems confirming that spreading the official and unofficial voices of the M5S represent a goal that supporters of this party take more seriously than those of other political formations.

Five Stars Movement Reactions Comments Media Sources Shares Count Count Count

ilfattoquotidiano.it 5.414,807 2.166,561 1.297,260

ilblogdellestelle.it 2.090,839 244,439 480,732

beppegrillo.it 1.223,890 163,816 293,264

fanpage.it 737,943 672,635 87,450

espresso.repubblica.it 283,281 128,441 75,779

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Reactions Comments Media Sources Shares Count Count Count

ilmattino.it 266,937 125,561 44,137

5stellenews.com 295,576 53,345 59,184

silenziefalsita.it 246,294 71,227 63,085

informazionevera.it 209,935 72,222 46,695

video.corriere.it 145,117 96,067 36,600 Table 2: Media sources from the Five Stars Movement party with most Facebook reactions, comments and shares

The clusters grouping sources who have not being attributed to any single political actor is mainly characterized (Table 3) by national mainstream news media sources and general press agencies websites (repubblica.it, lastampa.it, corriere.it, ansa.it, ilmessaggero.it), by some of the local editions of the national newspaper Repubblica and by video.repubblica.it, the Repubblica’ section dedicated to videos. The Italian version of the Huffington Post, huffingtonpost. it, is also included in the list. The so called Cross-partisan cluster also features lercio.it, which is a satire news site, deliberately spreading ironic hoaxes; probably for this reason it is the only media source in this group where the number of shares is noticeably higher than the number of comments.

Cross-partisan Reactions Comments Media Sources Shares Count Count Count

repubblica.it 2.564,560 1.226,283 585,454

lastampa.it 1.529,868 815,435 342,831

corriere.it 1.408,860 688,075 285,273

ansa.it 1.113,566 620,225 230,980

huffingtonpost.it 874,772 510,438 169,052

ilmessaggero.it 482,525 284,334 100,945

lercio.it 689,534 47,931 70,877

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Reactions Comments Media Sources Shares Count Count Count

palermo.repubblica.it 425,979 166,795 102,395

video.repubblica.it 328,623 158,277 53,582

milano.repubblica.it 315,660 145,763 56,117 Table 3: Media sources from the cross-partisan segment with most Facebook reactions, comments and shares

The Democratic Party cluster (Table 4) is characterized by a much more limited amount of Facebook interactions compared with the other clusters described so far, and it also features some peculiarities in term of media sources distribution. Concerning the engagement performance of the sources that have been attributed to the Democratic Party, the table confirms that Facebook interactions level is very low compared with the other clusters. Nextquotidiano.it, a hyper- partisan source close to the Democratic Party, is the first media source of this list and it has collected 293,956 reactions, 191,519 comments and 70,887 shares during the observation period. The NextQuotidiano number of interactions is very low compared with ilgiornale.it, ilfattoquotidiano.it and repubblica.it, the first media sources in the other lists. This could be partially explained by the fact that the latters are all mainstream media organizations; however, even if we compare nextquotidiano.it with ilpopulista.it (760,276 reactions, 299,766 comments and 100,738 shares) or beppegrillo.it (1,223,890 reactions, 163,816 comments 293,264 shares), the number of Facebook interactions is still very limited. The amount of Facebook interactions is even lower in the case of democratica.com, the official party’s press website. Moreover, as we described above, the Democratic Party cluster does not include any relevant national media outlet, such as ilfattoquotidiano.it (Five Stars Movement cluster) and ilgiornale.it (the League cluster), that may contribute in increasing the number of interaction characterizing the cluster of sources that have been associated to the Democratic Party. In this table, we can also notice the presence of the website iene.mediaset.it, an infotainment TV show broadcasted by the Mediaset Channel’s, Italia 1. This TV show usually airs journalistic investigations featuring stories highly critical of the political establishment, which are highly coherent with the Five Stars Movement narrative. However, by airing of an investigation related to the highly debated reimbursement system employed by Five Stars Movement MPs, this media source attracted the attention of supporters of Democratic Party, as we will describe more in details in the next sections of the present chapter.

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Democratic Party Reactions Comments Media Sources Shares Count Count Count

nextquotidiano.it 293,956 191,519 70,887

democratica.com 246,345 104,856 43,615

roma.repubblica.it 208,666 125,993 51,221

ilfoglio.it 172,784 91,576 41,223

iene.mediaset.it 127,812 113,430 34,115

lineapress.it 77,526 110,232 18,996

rep.repubblica.it 78,224 52,892 9,249

partitodemocratico.it 85,773 24,410 11,744

vanityfair.it 69,780 17,173 5.415

politicaeattualita.it 38,955 29,511 11,071 Table 4: Media sources from the Democratic Party with most Facebook reactions, comments and shares

The most engaging media sources included in the Free and Equal cluster are very heterogeneous (Table 5). The top two media sources, left.it and internazionale.it, are left wing national newsweeklies. The cluster also includes some blogs maintained by professional journalists (alleyoop.ilsole24ore.com and francescoluna.com), webzines and online news organizations, such as estense.com and valigiablu.it. Among the most engaging sources associated with the Free and Equal community we could also observe wumingfoundation. com, which is the blog of a collective of authors very close to the Italian radical left. Finally, the list includes articolo1mdp.it, the website of the progressive and democratic movement, a political entity related to the Free and Equal party. In any case, the volume of the interactions is really residual compared with sources associated to other political parties. It should also be noted that in the case of internazionale.it and alleyoop.ilsole24ore.com, Facebook posts received more shares than comments. This is a pattern that we have seen also for some sources included in the M5S cluster, however, here, the numbers are much more small.

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Free and Equal Reactions Comments Shares Media Sources Count Count Count

left.it 95,879 18,773 18,526

internazionale.it 49,508 9,086 11,644

alleyoop.ilsole24ore.com 17,673 3,915 4,453

valigiablu.it 16,265 4,723 2,344

wumingfoundation.com 10,938 3,975 2,822

estense.com 10,754 4,056 1,811

perugiatoday.it 7,941 3,931 1,789

forlitoday.it 7,948 4,465 1,091

articolo1mdp.it 6,277 5,362 1,382

francescoluna.com 6,357 3,601 1,987 Table 5: Media sources from Free and Equal party with most Facebook reactions, comments and shares

To conclude this part of the analysis on different engagement metrics on Facebook, we present in Figure 18 the top 10% most productive media sources (in term of URLs generated)15 ranked by average Facebook interactions (the larger chart in the center), shares (top-right), reactions (center-right) and comments (bottom-right). A comparative look to the three different Facebook metrics (shares, comments and reactions) shows that, while the distribution of reactions and shares are very similar (i.e. top shared sources are also those receiving more reactions), the list of top commented sources offer a different picture. For instance, ilblogdellestelle.it and beppegrillo.it, while ranking respectively first and second in term of both share and reactions obtained on Facebook, do not lead the rank of comments. Conversely repubblica.it, the top commented source, ranks only third in term of both shares and reactions.

15 We calculated the percentile on media sources URLs production, keeping only the 10% most productive.

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Controversial News Stories and Cross-partisan Engagement

A large majority of Italians claims that mainstream media are biased and the overall country level of trust in traditional media is low16. The combination between the distrust toward traditional media and the lack of a centralized control and traditional gatekeepers of digital media fostered during the last ten year a strong rhetoric on the supposed freedom of the online information. The leaders of the Five Stars M ovement, starting from the founder Beppe Grillo, leveraged on this distrust to popularize their alternative media outlets and bolster their own narratives.

In this context, our dataset allow to shed some light on the way partisan audiences interact with diverse online news stories. In light of the debate on information eco-chambers, it is interesting to observe how the behaviour of partisan audiences is affected by the political leaning of the source and its contents.

In order to do so, we present an in-depth analysis of two highly controversial and popular investigative report portraying scandals involving politicians belonging to two different parties. The first case, run by the online only media outlet Fanpage, illustrates an example of negative coverage for the Democratic Party. The second, run by Le Iene – a popular TV show aired by the Berlusconi owned free-to-air channel Italia 1 – is an example of negative coverage for the Five Stars Movement. Both reports run for several days in the middle of the electoral campaign.

The Fanpage inquiry called “Bloody Money” is a suitable example of this practice. During February 2018, fanpage.it shared a serie of videos shot during a journalistic investigation started by a public call to manage the waste disposal in Campania region. The report involved Roberto De Luca, the council member responsible for the budget of the municipality of Salerno, representative of the Democratic Party and son of the governor of the Campania region, Vincenzo De Luca. The inquiry was filmed by an hidden camera and carried on with the help of an infiltrated former mafia boss who got in touch with several politicians. De Luca junior resigned from his position in the council of the municipality few days after the investigation was made public. “Bloody Money” lead the Italian magistrates to investigate for corruption 17 politicians and businessman.

16 See 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer: http://cms.edelman.com/sites/default/ files/2018-02/2018_Edelman_Trust_Barometer_Global_Report_FEB.pdf.

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The whole “Bloody Money” investigative report consists of six episodes. Anticipated by few excerpts released to boost the attention and widely discussed, the complete video of the first episode was made available on February 16. The sixth and final complete episode was released on March 24. All the videos were published by Fanpage on their channels dedicated to videos (youmedia. fanpage.it) and consequently on their main website.

In order to understand, in light of this case, the behavior of partisan audiences, we compared the shares of the different typologies of Facebook interactions (comments, likes and shares) with specific reference to the ratio between comment and shares of the 50 most engaging media sources. Of those types of interactions, reactions are the most common followed by comments and shares. The three signals are highly correlated, with comments being the less correlated with the others.

Although both belonging to the same outlet and both being boosted by the success of “Bloody Money” youmedia.fanpage.it and fanpage.it collected a very different pattern of interaction (Figure 20). On the one hand, youmedia. fanpage.it is rare example of the category of news media source that collected overall more shares than comments (33,233 comments and 40,211 shares). This same category also includes, as prominent representative, the two official M5S news source. On the other hand, fanpage.it is media source with the highest disproportion between comments and shares (672,635 comments vs 87,450 shares) in the entire dataset.

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Youmedia.fanpage.it domain and its Facebook page, which is described in the information box as “a selection of best videos and photo galleries edited by Fanpage.it” hosts very different multimedia content, from video recipes to travel vlogs to emotional stories of humans and animals. Fanpage.it is a native online news media organization with an official editorial staff. It discusses different topics and frequently publishes journalistic inquiries, as well as diverse news. In the lead of the election fanpage.it covered a wide range of political news stories including both positive and negative coverage of all different political actors.

The involvement of a politician affiliated to the Democratic Party in a bribery investigation made this news story particularly suitable to be used by rival partisan audiences as a proof of the allegation of widespread corruption in that party. Most probably due to this investigative report, both Fanpage youmedia and main website significantly catalyzed the attention of M5S supporters. Consequently both domain are listed in MP-MPAS M5S category. Nevertheless, the way online audiences interacted with the two news sources are significantly different.

A more in depth look to the comment/share ratio of the top engaging Fanpage. it articles in our dataset shed some more light on this patterns (Figure 21).

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Thanks to the wide range of news stories published by fanpage.it, we can clearly observe in Figure 21 that news story covering under a positive light the Five Stars Movement or negative light its rivals tend to receive more shares than comments. On the contrary, positive coverage of M5S rivals are widely commented but not as much shared. ... news story covering under It is thus interesting to analyze this a positive light the Five Stars pattern on a case of negative coverage Movement or negative light its of the Five Stars Movement. The perfect rivals tend to receive more shares case to achieve this goal is offered by the than comments. investigative report “Rimborsopoli” run by Le Iene (Figure 22). The journalistic investigation also consists in a serie of videos edited by the reporter Filippo Roma, made available on the show website and broadcasted several times during February 2018. It unveiled a fraud committed by eight M5S MPs who disobeyed to the party internal rule that requires every M5S MP to reimburse a part of their salary to a special fund created by the party to fund small enterprises. For its peculiarity the “Rimborsopoli” case beard the potential to hit M5S at the hearth of its political identity, based on the honesty in contrast to the old, corrupt, political class.

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As for “Bloody Money”, also “Rimborsopoli” catalyzed the attention of those who could benefit by the negative coverage of its adversary, leading Le Iene as a news source to be filed in the Democratic Party MP-MPAS category. A closer inspection to the bottom left part of ... the yellow cluster formed the chart displayed in Figure 23, also by informazionevera.it, reveal the pattern of interactions of less silenziefalsita.it, 5stellenews.com popular media source including Le Iene. and ilfastidioso.myblog.it (all As pointed out by Figure 23, the overall hyper-partisan media sources) ratio between comments and shares share a pattern of interactions of Le Iene resembles those observed for the news stories converting under a that closely resemble those of the positive light M5S’ competitors. On the official voices of the Movement. other hand, the yellow cluster formed by informazionevera.it, silenziefalsita.it, 5stellenews.com and ilfastidioso.myblog.it (all hyper-partisan media sources) share a pattern of interactions that closely resemble those of the official voices of the Movement.

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In other terms, when a news story bear the potential to damage the Five Stars Movement (either because it’s direct negative coverage or positive coverage for the competitors), it receives an unusual volume of comments.

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The diverging cases of “Bloody Money” and “Rimborsopoli” pointed out the usefulness of the comment/share ratio metric in revealing the different behaviour of online partisan audiences. Figure 24, thus, explores the ratio between comments and shares for the most engaging 50 media sources in our dataset. The average comment/share ratio of these 50 media sources is 2.212 and a first look to the distribution of colors in the chart seems to point out, with the notable exception discussed above of Fanpage.it, a clear prevalence of yellow sources (M5S) at the bottom. This first impression is further confirmed by Figures 25 to 28. The only category of sources with a comment/share ratio below the average is the M5S one. It also worth to note that the average score for the League category is slightly lower than the average score for PD and Cross-partisan category. An additionally hint pointing in the same direction is provided by Figure 29 that displays a list of news media sources with a comment/share ratio score below 1. With the exception of Lercio (a satirical website), all the other news sources in listed have been adjudicated via the MP-MPAS to the Five Stars Movement.

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Media Coverage of Election Issues

Observed over time, the online media coverage in the run up of the 2018 Italian General Election shows, both in terms of the numbers of stories per day and Facebook engagement, a clear increasing trend from September 2017 until the Election Day (4th March 2018).

There is a significant difference in the number of online news stories published immediately before and during the full electoral campaign period – that formally starts 30 days before the election day, according to Italian legislation – compared to the previous period: between September and December 2017 there are, on average, about 359 news stories per day, in January 2018 617 news stories per day (+72% compared to the previous period), and in February- March there are 684 news stories per day (+91%).

Comments, reactions and shares of news stories on Facebook share the same trend: in February-March 2018 the average engagement per day is 290% of the average engagement per day of September 2017, indicating that the audience engagement grow up as the elections got closer.

In this chapter, we present an analysis of the main topics that have characterized the news coverage and their Facebook engagement during the six month before the election day. The chapter is structured as follows: first, we present an in-depth analysis of the main topics; second, we discuss the ten most engaging news stories in the entire period of observation; then, we analyse the media

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coverage of the four main candidates and, finally, we present four case studies aimed to provide and in-depth description of an emblematic news story for each main candidate.

Engaging days, engaging issues Both in the period from September 1, 2017 until January 1, 2018 (pre-campaign) and in the period from February 1, 2018 until the election day (campaign), the engagement peaked on a limited number of days, and focused on a limited number of news stories. Therefore, we have identified the ten days with greater engagement in both the periods, and extracted, within these days, the most engaging news stories (N = 789) in order to analyse more in depth their content, according to the method described in the methodological section of this report (see Appendix 1, “Content Analysis” section). We analysed the news titles and descriptions of the most engaging news stories in the most engaging days, by classifying them through the largely accredited categories of “political issues” (dynamics of the political system and more abstract spheres of the political competitions), “policy issues” (concrete problems that affect citizens closely and that the political system may face through specific interventions), “campaign issues” (strategic and organizational aspects of the electoral campaign), and “personal issues” (leaders/candidates’ extra-political qualities and activities). We added the category “news report” to classify stories that reported accounts related to some of these issues or other topics lacking a clear reference to the Italian political campaign or the candidates/parties/coalitions/ideologies.

These macro categories have been further classified in several subcategories (micro issues) that both leveraged on previous scholarship and emerged from data17.

Overall, over 6 months, in the most engaging days, we found a significant presence of political issues (35.2%), followed by policy issues (24.9%), campaign issues (23.1%), and personal issues (7.5%). News reports characterized the 8.6% of the sampled news. Less than 1% of the sample was classified as “other”.

Interesting differences in the distribution of these categories of issues (and relative micro-issues) emerged between the pre-campaign period and the month before the Election Days (see Figure 31 and tables in Appendix 4).

17 For a more detailed description of the categories see Appendix 1: Methods - Content Analysis.

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The pre-campaign period was dominated by “campaign issues” (33.3%). This result is due, in particular, to the Sicily Regional elections, held in November 2017, won by the center-right coalition but with a remarkable result of the Five Stars Movement (M5S). Leveraging on this result, the M5S could encourage the undecided constituency, in the frame of an electoral law that rewarded broad consensus (easier to reach for coalitions than for a single party). “Good news: the 5 Star Movement is the only real great political force in the country”, wrote Luigi Di Maio on beppegrillo.it, obtaining an high engagement in this news category. Moreover, the deep defeat of Democratic Party (PD) in Sicily led the M5S leader, Luigi Di Maio, to decline the invite for a public debate programmed with the PD leader (and former Premier), Matteo Renzi. In the attempt to delegitimize his opponent, Di Maio claimed he did not recognize Renzi a real competitor anymore: “Di Maio cancels the TV confrontation with Renzi: «He is no longer the competitor»”, entitled repubblica.it in one of the most engaging news among the “campaign issues” category.

These “campaign” news stories – which referred to the local election results and to the management of TV debate – catalyzed the attention of digital press and social media audience in the pre-campaign run, along with the news story concerning Renzi’s “Destination Italy” electoral train tour. According to the most engaging news stories circulated online at the time, “Destination Italy” resembled – due the countless protests awaiting at most stations – an “Odyssey” more than a tour: “Democratic Party, the Renzi’s train travels incognito: to avoid protests and insults at every stop, the program and dates are canceled”, titled

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the first most engaging news story in this campaign category, published by Il Fatto Quotidiano. Also the third most engaging news story of this category, by huffingtonpost.it, reports claims against Renzi’s campaign: “Renzi takes a political rally in a church. The parish priest: «We didn’t know about it, we are upset»”. In the second position, within this macro-category of issue, a satirical news story run by lercio.it (similar to the American “The Onion”) claiming that the Democratic Party tested his program with monkeys.

In general, looking at the top ten most engaging news concerning “campaign issues”, five were negative coverage of Renzi, including the first three top engaging news stories, whereas other two enthusiastically celebrated the electoral successes of the M5S in Sicily, and were published by beppegrillo. it, the blog of the popular Italian comedian who co-founded, together with Gianroberto Casaleggio, the Movement. While the campaign news stories with negative coverage of Renzi gained social media popularity, the most engaging news stories related to the Five Stars Movement and its leaders were mostly published by their official party sources.

The case of another campaign issue confirmed that the Facebook engagement has privileged the positive coverage of the M5S in the pre-campaign period. The case refers to the choice of the M5S’s candidates for the General Election through an internal referendum, called “Parlamentarie”. According to many observers, this process was not entirely transparent, yet these negative news stories related to “Parlamentarie” had a low level of engagement on Facebook. Furthermore, seven out of the ten most engaging news stories related to “Parlamentarie” were published by the Movement’s blogs and defended its “honest” image.

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The second most prominent category of issues in the pre-campaign period is the “policy” one (26.4%), wherein the top stories are related to the approval, in December 2017, of the living-will law, which has aroused considerable interest online and offline, also because it was a law debated for almost eleven years and strictly connected to mediatic cases such as those of Piergiorgio Welby, Eluana Englaro and, more recently, dj Fabo, all persons who, along with their familiars and politicians of the Radical Party, have fought for the right to euthanasia, in a country like Italy, where Catholic religion – which reveres life as sacred – has a great influence due to historical, cultural and political reasons.

Within the “policy” news, also the eviction of “Grandma Peppina” has had particular resonance in the pre-campaign period. Peppina, a 95 years old woman affected by the earthquake that struck central Italy who was denied an accomodation, quickly become an iconic media character of the early afternoon TV shows representing the needy neglected by the State. Together with the story of “Peppina”, other news related to government’s policies highlighted, more or less directly, the inability of the State to provide the right assistance to the weakest citizens. Nevertheless, supported by a rhetoric that makes personalization the main tool to arouse empathy and identification in the audience, the “Grandma Peppina” case was the news story that best catalyzed this idea.

Other engaging news about “policy issues” such as the problem of the missed abrogation of the MPs’ life annuity (so called “vitalizi”) reinforced the representation of a deep distance between the (privileged) political class and the citizens. The M5S has fought hard against these privileges and, more in general, against the “high costs” of politics, establishing an internal rule that obliges its MPs to give back a part of their salary in favour of a micro-credit fund. The Movement dominated the news related to the case of “vitalizi”. The top

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engaging news story about this topic was indeed published by ilblogdellestelle. it: “#NoiRinunciamoAlPrivilegio (“we renounce to the privilege”). The D-Day of the parties has come. Today deputies and senators have matured their privileged pension, while all the other Italian citizens will be forced to work for who knows how many years to get a poor pension treatment”. This populist communicative style is typical of the M5S, which represents itself as a honest new political force that fight against the old, corrupt political class, for the benefit of ordinary citizens.

Also the news concerning “political issues” in the pre-campaign period (21.5%) were characterized by this populist narrative. In particular, the most engaging stories in this macro category deal with legal issues and corruption. More specifically, several news stories mention the allegation moved by the M5S’s leaders to Silvio Berlusconi and other members of his party to be in contact with the Mafia.

Another relevant topic concerns the scandals involving banks, Renzi, and other exponents of the Democratic Party. While articles about the arrest of a M5S candidate in the Sicilian elections also appear in this micro category, the top engaging story is focused on Matteo Renzi, who showed his bank account balance during a TV show, in the attempt to demonstrate his transparency in the “bank affair”. Renzi’s gesture indicates that the M5S’s “campaign for honesty” has been able to condition the other candidates’ political moves.

In the (more residual) “personal issue” category of this pre-campaign period (9.9%), we found many news stories reporting personal attacks to Luigi Di Maio, pointing to his lack of political experience, the fact he is not holding an higher education degree, and a grammatical mistake he made during an interview. The attacks came from his political opponents, especially , a center-

MAPPING ITALIAN NEWS MEDIA POLITICAL COVERAGE IN THE LEAD-UP OF 2018 GENERAL ELECTION 52 Elezioni - 2018 Mapping Italian News right politician and TV star well known for his provocative communication style, and also from the foreign press. Within this category, we also observed engaging news stories about the mayor of Turin, Chiara Appendino, exponent of the M5S, who dedicated her time to assist an ill child on a metro. Laura Boldrini and Matteo Salvini are protagonists of other news concerning personal insults. Boldrini, a left-wing politician, outgoing President of the Chamber of Deputies and former United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, has indeed become a target of right-wing politicians and their supporters for her immigration policy. For this reason, an article published in January gathered a considerable attention around the story of some League activists who burned a puppet that depicted Boldrini at the helm of a ship carrying migrants. Boldrini’s rebuttal also ignited the interest of the online publics when she labelled the League leader as “disgusting”.

Immigration policies was a common trail of pre and campaign in the lead of the election. It is the first policy issue in the whole sample of the most engaging news, both for media coverage and for total engagement. This topic was Immigration policies was a capable, like few other issues, to common trail of pre and campaign articulate the ideological distinction in the lead of the election. between political candidates and parties oriented towards openness to migrant and refugees, like the above-mentioned Laura Boldrini or the Democratic Party of Matteo Renzi, and those that pursue more strict policies, like the League of Matteo Salvini. Curiously, in the pre-campaign period, the news story about immigration with more engagement is not dedicated to Salvini, but to the Democratic Party, and once again it is not a positive story. The story support an allegation of hypocrisy in matters of immigration policies through a particular, private, case: “«I love a refugee of color», and his mother, a PD mayor and supporter of immigrants rights: «you’re sick»”.

The official campaign period was immediately marked by a series of events deeply connected with immigration. The campaign period starts, in fact, with the racist raid in Macerata. The raid was executed by a former Northern League

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candidate, Luca Traini, and the episode immediately turned from a news report into a policy issue. Due to the relevance of such news reports, during the official campaign period, “policy issues” were less than in the previous phase (23.4%). More than a third of the news referring to policy issues focused on the micro- issue of immigration because of the aforementioned racist raid. Indeed, after this raid, many journalists, intellectuals like Roberto Saviano, and political opponents, judged the League leader Matteo Salvini morally responsible for the crime because of his violent speeches in support of anti-immigration policies. Salvini replied to the accusations by reaffirming his position: “Shooting Macerata, Salvini: «The invasion of migrants leads to social conflict». The secretary of the League: «Anyone who shoots is a criminal. But an immigration out of control leads to social conflict»”. The letter written by an adoptive mother of two African children, who accused Salvini of provoking, through his solutions, racist attitudes in the population, has also attracted the attention of social media: “The adoptive mother of two children writes to Salvini: «You make my children live in terror, thank you»”.

Before and during the official campaign, immigration was a micro issue with a significant presence also in “news reports”, concerning 18 out of 68 news included in this macro category.18In 14 of these news reports, immigration was connected to episodes of violence and crimes perpetrated by immigrants. In some cases, these episodes became expedients, for the League advocates, to back their anti-immigrants policies. An example is the case of immigrants

18 The other micro-issues that emerged from data as regards the category of “news reports” have been classified in this way: female murders/bullying/vandals/gunfire/crashes (8); statistics (national debt, employments, health, instruction, justifiable homicide) (7); foreign leader/ policies (4); events involving professors and parents at school (4); movies and TV programmes about cultural heritage, Mussolini, and homosexuals (4); scientific events/pollution (4); layoffs/ underpaid workers/insufficient pensions (4); episodes of corruption/insolvency involving businessmen (3); terrorist attacks in other countries (2); other (10).

MAPPING ITALIAN NEWS MEDIA POLITICAL COVERAGE IN THE LEAD-UP OF 2018 GENERAL ELECTION 54 Elezioni - 2018 Mapping Italian News traveling on public buses without a ticket: “Italy is hostage, free bus to immigrants to avoid violent reactions. Immigrants travel for free, policemen forced to buy tickets for them on the buses of Agrigento: the complaint comes from the Sicilian secretary of the League, Pagano”. News reports dealing with immigration (referring statistics, speaking of good actions by immigrants, and describing the troubles immigrants face) are very few. Yet, it is just one of these news reports that gained, in absolute, the highest engagement we recorded in the entire period of observation (see below paragraph).

Immigration sparked and re-ignited ideological divisions, leading to prominence, particularly during the official campaign, of the fascism/anti-fascism discourses, a still open historical political fracture of Italian society, that contributed to the significant presence of political issues in the latest phase of observation. The culprit of the Macerata raid was openly supported by right-wing and far- right parties. At the same time, it led to street demonstrations against violence, race discrimination and thus fascism. During an anti-fascist protest organized in response to a rally of the far-right party CasaPound, a teacher wished death to the policemen that protected the area. An engaging news in this context is related to a declaration of Matteo Renzi: “Professor to the policemen: «You must die». Renzi: «She must be fired»”.

Beyond immigration, the “policy issue” that gathered the highest volume of interactions (in the sampled days of the official campaign, as well as in the overall period of observation, see below) is related to economics and largely caused by this news: “Unpaid electric bills will be (partially) at the expense of the other consumers”. Many news within this micro category referred also to the troubles of pensioners and the need to change the law that regulates retirements.

There were also news on local policies, mainly related to the Rome and Turin M5S mayors, respectively Virginia Raggi and Chiara Appendino. These news

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stories mainly reports the successes of the M5S local administrators, and almost half of these articles came from sources directly related to the Movement.

As regards the prominent category of “political” issue (49.5%), in the campaign period the most engaging micro issue was related to institutional candidacies and possibile form of government. Statements on the institutional candidacies are news stories mainly related to M5S. Indeed, Luigi Di Maio presented a list of ministers, an unconventional choice, since Italy has a parliamentary system and the ministers are thus formally nominated by the President. This unconventional move responded both to the allegation of lack of competence of M5S leadership and resonated with the narrative of “honesty” supported through attacks to the “crooked” establishment. Within the “political” issues in the campaign period, the most engaging news story – written by Luigi Di Maio himself and published by ilblogdellestelle.it – was in fact the presentation of the team selected to join the future government: “It is with great pride that today I present you a government team that is a National Heritage. I am proud of the absolute excellence of this team of men and women who are making themselves available to Italians. This is a historical event. For the first time in the history of the Republic a government team proposal is presented before the elections”.

Among the “political issues”, scandals and corruption also attracted a lot of online attention in the campaign period. The topics of this micro category concerned both an inquiry on the corruption of PD members in Campania region and the allegations of collusion with the Mafia moved by M5S to Berlusconi. Nevertheless, the majority of news in this category focuses on M5S and its “Rimborsopoli” scandal. According to an internal rule, the M5S MPs are required to pay part of their income to a microcredit fund. However, an investigative report carried out by a very popular TV show unveiled multiple violation of this rule. Several news stories are dedicated to this topic, potentially hitting the M5S at the hearth of its political identity, based on the honesty in contrast to the old, corrupt, political class. While the majority of articles focuses on this scandal, the most

MAPPING ITALIAN NEWS MEDIA POLITICAL COVERAGE IN THE LEAD-UP OF 2018 GENERAL ELECTION 56 Elezioni - 2018 Mapping Italian News engaging news story in the category is once again from ilblogdellestelle.it: “The court of Rome backs Virginia Raggi up: unfounded criminal record!”.

As the election day got closer, within the “campaign issues” (12.2%), news coverage focused on conversations caught off-air between the exponents of the center-right coalition on the electoral results and demonstrations against candidates during their campaign tour, like Matteo Renzi, Giorgia Meloni (the leader of Italian Brothers), and Matteo Salvini. The latter was specifically criticized for his campaign in the south of Italy that sharply contrasted with the League’ traditional discourses on defending the rights of the economically productive north against the “widespread” corruption of the south. Another news story in this category is that of Berlusconi signing a “contract with the Italians” during the popular political TV show “Porta a Porta”, the program where he performed, 17 years before, the same symbolic scene.

The “personal issues” category of the campaign period contains less news stories compared to the same category of the pre-campaign period (4.9%). However, also in this phase, 3 of the 10 most engaging news concerned the personal attacks/insults from Vittorio Sgarbi to Di Maio, and other 2 of these stories criticize M5S’ affiliates. The other two main characters of these engaging personal issues, were Berlusconi (with his attitudes towards women) and Salvini (criticized by the Ministry of Cultural Heritage for his low cultural level, and at the centre of a dispute around his music preference).

The agenda that emerges from the news stories that gathered most attention in the lead up of the election are thus characterized by multiple micro issues sharing a set of commons trails. The first prominent narrative pertains the fight

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between the “crooked”/“privileged” political class – involved in scandals and legal issues – and the citizens – unemployed, victims of increasing taxation, natural disasters that the State is not able to face, and the pension reform. This distance was a favourable terrain for the engaging self-communicated news of the Five Stars Movement, particularly the ones delegitimizing the opponents (mainly Berlusconi and Renzi), as well as the ones announcing the Movement’s “honest” and “competent” candidates. Moreover, the most engaging news of the most engaging day depicted an agenda wherein the policies about immigration and reports of crimes perpetrated by immigrants have been a dominant micro- issue, that cannibalized almost a third of the sampled news concerning policy issue and news reports, particularly as the Election Day got closer, because of a racist raid that brought fascism/anti-fascism back at the core of the Italian political and media agenda.

The top 10 most engaging news in the lead up of the election In the previous section, we presented an in depth analysis of the issues covered by the most engaging news published in a limited number of days, during both the pre-campaign period and the official campaign phase, as during these days we registered the highest peaks of engagement. When we turn to the whole period of observation, we can observe that while the large majority of the issues have been covered in the sample, there are few significant exceptions. In order to underline these expectations, we thus focus in this section on the 10 news stories that have been, overall, most commented, reacted, and shared on Facebook over the mapped six months (see tables in Appendix 2). This focus enable us also to analyse in-depth the sources, the micro/macro categories of issues, and the content of the most “spreadable” news.

Six of these 10 top news stories have been published online as the Election Six of these 10 top news stories Day got closer. The other four most have been published online as the engaging online news stories follow Election Day got closer. newsworthy offline events occurred in September (a judge’s decision), December (the approval of a new law), and January (the coming into force of a new law).

Seven of these 10 top news have been published during the most engaging days we sampled in the previous section. The three exceptions occupy the sixth, the seventh and the last position in this rank.

In the first position, we find the most engaging news we classified as “news report” about immigration. Specifically, it is an excerpt from the popular Italian TV music festival (“Sanremo”), aired when the official electoral campaign was started. It has been published by the YouTube channel of the public service Television (Rai) and refers to a monologue performed during the festival telling

MAPPING ITALIAN NEWS MEDIA POLITICAL COVERAGE IN THE LEAD-UP OF 2018 GENERAL ELECTION 58 Elezioni - 2018 Mapping Italian News of the troubles of an immigrant who escapes from the war in the country of origin. It is an exemplar case of “pop politics”, that is, a hybrid genre of political communication, wherein the products of popular culture feature political issues.

Also the second most engaging news has been classified as “news report”, and also in this case the protagonist is one of the hosts of Sanremo TV music festival, Claudio Baglioni, a very popular singer. This news recalls one of the policy issues covered during the period of observation, that is, the troubles of the Italians damaged by the earthquakes. Yet, as well as in the previous case, the information is not directly related to the policies activated to solve these problems. It instead reports a donation that the singer did to the victims of the earthquake. It has been published two days after the end of the festival, and after the criticism against the hosts’ wealthy cachets. The original source is an online newspaper that deals with journeys – and which declares two different dates of registrations in two different local tribunals. This news represents a case of “problematic information”. Indeed its generic title and the date of publication could mislead, suggesting a connection between Sanremo’s cachet and the donation. Yet, within the article, an old news is recalled: a charity concert Baglioni did two years before, in 2016. After its publication, the news was labeled as “fake” by the other newspapers, even if the content was true. Given the “problematic” nature of this popular news, the singer’s press office published a clarification.

The third position among the most engaging news stories is reached by a piece covering a policy issue, and in particular the micro issue of taxes. It was published by a leading economic newspaper (“Il Sole24Ore”) and explains a decision formalized by the Authority for Energy, in January 2018, on the base of the State Council’s and Administrative Court’s sentences: a part of the electric

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companies’ outstanding debt will be distribute among the consumers who regularly pay for energy. In this case, unlike the previous two cases, the news refers to a public intervention on one of the problems that citizens face in their everyday life. Published three weeks before the Election Day, this news story presents the second most high percentage of comments (with a significant difference as compared with the average).

The four most engaging news story dates back to December 2017, when the law on the living will law was approved by the Italian Senate. It covers this policy issue, as well as the news story that occupies the ninth position in this top 10. The original sources, in both cases, are two leading national newspaper (“La Repubblica” and “Il Fatto quotidiano”). Both sources underline the decisive role of the collaboration between Democratic Party and Five Stars Movement. The articles report press releases, tweets, and Facebook posts by politicians and institutional exponents who had different opinions about this legislative change, along with the statements of other public figures and relatives of patients engaged in the struggle for the right to interrupt the medical treatments in the final phases of the disease. Moreover, the articles embed videos (La Repubblica) and slideshare file (Il Fatto quotidiano) that explain what the law envisages. “La Repubblica” inserts also links to an in-depth analysis on the other reforms that the Cabinet “must not betray”, while “Il Fatto Quotidiano” reserves more space to the long path of this law, giving voice to video declarations of the activists who presented a petition to ask the Senate’s President for the immediate approval of the law, before the General Election. The fifth more engaging news story refers to a “political issue”, and in particular to the legal issues that involved an important representative of the Five Stars Movement, Virginia Raggi. In 2017, Raggi was under investigation for some positions she filled at the beginning of her experience as mayor of Rome. The investigation on Virginia Raggi was a threat to the credibility of the whole Five Stars Movement – which leverages on the renewal of the “crooked” political class. In February 2018, ten days before the general elections, Raggi communicates that the Court of Rome has dismissed the lawsuit. While she had published the same news directly on her Facebook Profile, the source of this fifth more engaging news story on Facebook was the Five Stars Movement blog (“Il Blog delle Stelle”).

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At the sixth position, among the top 10 most engaging news stories, we find a news that was published in one of the day that did not register a peak of engagement, and exactly before the Election Day. It was an hoax published in a website, llfatto.it, whose name recalls a leading Italian newspaper and whose “pay-off” plays “online daily newspaper”. Looking at this source, a click baiting “grammar” clearly emerges, through titles that promise miraculous medical It was an hoax published in a therapies and denounce immigrants website, llfatto.it, whose name eating skinned dogs. The news reported recalls a leading Italian newspaper the discovery of 500.000 pre-filled and whose “pay-off” plays “online electoral ballots in Sicily. To increase daily newspaper”. the credibility of the news, precise references to concrete places (city, street) have been provided, along with the reference to a phantom “electoral police”. To increase its veracity, the news includes an “update” (without indicating any dates): the guilty party is a typographer who had copied by mistake a pre- filled electoral ballot, abandoning them in the street. From a different source and with different geographic references, the same hoax spread during the campaign for the constitutional referendum in 2016 and during the Local Elections in 2017. Compared to the other 10 news, the structure of engagement for this story present the highest number of comments (which represent one third of the total engagement generated by this news), but also the second highest percentage of shares (with a significant difference as compared with the average).

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The seventh position in the top 10 of the most engaging news is also occupied by a news story that was published in one of the day that did not register a peak of engagement. The source is, again, the leading newspaper “Il Fatto Quotidiano”. This piece – which was published three weeks before the Elections Day – covers a micro category of policy issue that did not emerge as relevant during the most engaging days, that is, European policies and their effects on Italian economy. More specifically, mixing a video reportage and a written article, the story refers to the troubles that Sicilian farmers face to cultivate the “red gold” of Pachino, that is, a type of tomato that grows up only in the south of the island. In this news story, the farmers raised an allegation to the European Union, explaining why it is difficult to compete with the costs of the products that come from Africa because of the commercial agreements between EU and North African countries. Moreover, the interviewed farmers criticized the Italian Minister Martina for his lack of commitment in facing this problem within the European Commission. Compared with the other 10 news, this story is the most shared.

The story of “grandma Peppina”, an earthquake victim who became the symbol of the inertia of the State, is covered by the eighth most engaging news story, published by a local newspaper. The article explains that a small little house had been built to her by the daughters, after the earthquake that destroyed her previous one. The new house, however, was considered a building abuse. For this reason, in September 2017 the old lady had been forced to abandon it and move elsewhere. The news – enhanced by photos of a weeping “grandma Peppina” who leaves her house – reports the claim of Peppina’s daughter: “Today the State is dead”. As we already said, in the ninth position there is another news story about the

MAPPING ITALIAN NEWS MEDIA POLITICAL COVERAGE IN THE LEAD-UP OF 2018 GENERAL ELECTION 62 Elezioni - 2018 Mapping Italian News living will law approval, and in the last position of this rank of engaging news, we find another story that was not published during one of the most engaging days. And, also in this case, the covered issue is a policy one. Specifically, the article was published by a magazine that deals with music, pop culture, and politics (“Rolling Stone”), and it is a comment around a law that came into force at the beginning of January, introducing a cost of few cents for the biodegradable bags used to buy fruits and vegetables. This aspect of the law raised harsh criticism on social media, timely covered by the traditional media in the algorithmic turn of the news values. Yet, the article that has reached the tenth position in this rank is a written and video reportage on the pollution that is invading Bali’s beaches because of the plastic bags. Thus, despite the polemics covered by traditional media, the news story which gained more attention on Facebook about this issue endorsed the Italian legislative initiative.

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The online media coverage of political leaders

31,384 out of 84,815 news stories (37%) mentioned in their titles and descriptions one or more leaders of the four main parties. The most mentioned politician is Matteo Renzi, followed by Silvio Berlusconi, Matteo Salvini and Luigi Di Maio (Figure 32).

Despite being the less mentioned leader, articles featuring Luigi Di Maio were widely popular on Facebook. The overall total engagement for the news stories about Di Maio is second only to the engagement reached by the news mentioning Renzi, with a tiny difference of 0.78%. It’s a striking result obtained with 35% less dedicated news stories. If we compare the engagement of the news stories mentioning Di Maio with those dedicated to Salvini – who had a comparable media coverage (8.3% more news than Di Maio) – the difference remains considerable (see Figure 33).

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The engagement achieved by news stories citing Di Maio is also noteworthy if we bear in mind that news specifically mentioning a politician or a party in their title or description tend to be less engaging than other types of news stories. Indeed, on average, the issues mentioning politicians received about 700 interactions against the 908 of the other types of news stories. Di Maio’s news stories reach about 1,043 interactions on average, while the average engagement per news of the other main candidates is closest to the average of their category: 684 for Berlusconi, 687 for Renzi, 790 for Salvini (see Table 6).

News not citing a News citing a politician politician or a party or a party

AVG comments 206.30 195.79

AVG shares 132.40 90.30

AVG reactions 569.24 414.81

AVG engagement 907.94 700.90 Table 6: Average comments, shares and reactions per news stories not citing a politician or a party and cit- ing a politician or a party

Moreover, the news stories about Di Maio reach the peak of engagement in the week before the elections. The top engaging news story of this week is published by the official website of the M5S, ilblogdellestelle.it, and deals with

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the presentation of the list of members of a potential government lead by the Movement.

These data show that, despite a relative lower digital media coverage, the leader of the Five Stars Movement, compared to the other candidates, has been able to conquer a successful and exclusive mediatic space.

We found another significant difference between the news stories mentioning Di Maio and the ones paying attention to other candidates. The stories mentioning Di Maio associate less often, in their titles and descriptions, his name to the one of his competitors. While Di Maio’s name is mentioned together with (an) other leader(s) only in the 19.3% of the cases, this happens for Berlusconi in the 30.5% of the cases, for Salvini in the 25.1% of the cases, and for Renzi in the 23.5% of the cases.

Top issues by leader To outline a profile of the media and digital media presence of the main candidates, we performed a cluster analysis of the titles and descriptions of the news stories pertinent to them, extracting the ten most significant groups of news stories following to the methods described in the methodological section. Then, we classified the clusters of news stories according to the macro and micro categories of issues presented above.

Silvio Berlusconi The clusters of news stories related to Silvio Berlusconi are mainly related to “political issues”. Specifically, five clusters of news are related to political issues and within these, two clusters are related to legal issues, two are related to institutional candidacies and government formulas, and one to alliances, coalitions and governability.

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The political cluster with greater engagement concerns, in particular, legal issues. The news stories related to these issues concern the allegations of Berlusconi’s collusion with the Mafia, and include, in particular, many attacks from the main representatives of the Five Stars Movement, Luigi Di Maio and . The most engaging news story in this cluster is an attack from Luigi Di Maio that titled: “Di Maio to Berlusconi: «We make wire transfers to Italian companies, you made them to the Mafia»” (see the case study on Berlusconi for a focus on this news story).

The “policy issues” category include three clusters of news stories, that, overall, reach the highest media coverage. All these three clusters are about economics and fiscal policy. A news cluster is about “Flat Tax”, another on “basic income”, that is, the political proposals that characterized Berlusconi’s electoral campaign. The last is about the “Fornero law”, a recent and very contested law that regulates retirements in Italy. As regards this last issue, some conflicts between Berlusconi and his ally, Matteo Salvini, emerge. Indeed, Salvini promises to radically abolish the “Fornero law”, and not to modify it, as, instead, Berlusconi proposes.

Also the “campaign issue” has had some relevance, with two clusters. One is related to the party symbol presented by Silvio Berlusconi on Twitter. Within the symbol, there was the written slogan “Berlusconi for President”, even though he was not candidable because of his conviction for fiscal fraud: the news became then object of debate. The other “campaign issue” cluster concerns the clamorous contestation of a “Femen” activist in topless at the polling station

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where the former Prime Minister was voting. The protester jumped on a table in front of Berlusconi and shouted: “Your time is up, Berlusconi!”.

Luigi Di Maio “Political issues” characterize the clusters of news stories related to Luigi Di Maio, with six clusters of news stories: one is related to alliances, coalitions and governability, another to institutional candidacies and forms of government and four to legal issues. Therefore, also in the case of Di Maio, as in that of Berlusconi, the news stories concerning legal issues are prominent. However, there is a relevant difference: while in the case of Berlusconi the news stories mainly concern his legal issues, in the case of Di Maio they are mainly related to his attacks against the old and corrupted political class. Indeed, two clusters out four include news stories on the “Bancopoli” scandals, that is the scandals that linked eminent representatives of the Democratic Party, including Matteo Renzi, to banks affairs; the third is related to another inquiry on the corruption, again, of the Democratic Party politicians, in this case those of the Campania region. Another cluster on legal issues, however, is about a candidate of the Five Stars Movement under investigation for money laundering, and thus expelled from the party.

The other two political clusters of news concer the internal changes to the party, like the Beppe Grillo steps aside from the party and the possible governmental collaborations with other parties, traditionally firmly refused by the Movement, and to institutional candidacies, related to the unconventional presentation of a list of potential ministers. Both this two groups of news stories has conveyed a more or less implicit, but politically meaningful, communicative message. Indeed, the Five Stars Movement has always been accused to be dependent from its charismatic leader Beppe Grillo and to lack basic competences among its representatives. Beppe Grillo progressive distancing from the party during the electoral campaign and the presentation of lists of academics, intellectual, sportsman and journalists as its “super-competent team” disempowered both long standing critics.

Other two clusters of news stories concerns “personal issues”. The first is related to the controversy with the centre-right politician Vittorio Sgarbi who was the direct opponent of Di Maio in the constituency of Pomigliano (Campania region). The second is related to the personal qualities of Luigi Di Maio, that by participating in the traditional Catholic liturgy of San Gennaro, patron of , present himself as a person linked to the traditional religious values as well as to the culture of , where the Movement obtained a considerable electoral success.

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Matteo Renzi The clusters of news stories related to Matteo Renzi are equally distributed between “campaign issue” and “political issues”, each with four clusters of news. The news related to the “campaign issues” reach, overall, the greatest engagement, and they concern the campaign activities of the Democratic Party candidate. Within these campaign issues, the cluster with the highest Facebook engagement is about the cancellation of the TV debate with the opponent Luigi Di Maio, following the electoral defeat of the PD at the regional elections in Sicily. A second cluster of news stories concerns the contested Renzi’s train electoral tour. The last two clusters in the “campaign issues” category concern, the first, the presentation of the party program, and the second, the participation of Renzi at the main Democratic Party festival, the “Unity Party”. The top engaging news of this last cluster is, once again, negative coverage: “At the National Unity Party in Imola is the desert”.

In the “political issues” category there are two clusters on legal problems and corruption, one cluster on fascism and anti-fascism, and a last cluster on institutional candidacies and government formulas.

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We have already seen the news stories related to legal issues, since they are about the unclear relation between eminent representatives of the Democratic Party and banks, an issue that clearly emerges also in the political communication of M5S. Also the other political issue on institutional candidacies is related to banks, since it has mainly to do with the appointment of the head of the Bank of Italy.

The last cluster of news stories concerns the antifascist positions of the Democratic Party and its leader, that can be also read in the light of the racist raid of Macerata, that have created, as we have seen, a political climate that led parties and their leader to stress their ideological position. This antifascist claims can also be seen as a tentative of ideological realignment on the left positions by the leader of the Democratic Party, whose political career has been characterized by both a multi-party government with the right-wing forces and a clash with some left-wing groups that led to a scission. However, this cluster of news stories did not reach a significant volume of Facebook engagement.

Matteo Salvini The cluster of news stories related to Matteo Salvini concerned mainly “policy issues” and “campaign issues”. Two out of four clusters classified as “policy issues” are about immigration, one is about economics and fiscal policy, and the last one is on policy over health. The most engaging cluster of news stories is about the racist raid in Macerata and the allegations to the leader of the League to be the “moral instigator” of the crime, because of his anti-immigrant stances. Another cluster of news directly related to immigration policies is

MAPPING ITALIAN NEWS MEDIA POLITICAL COVERAGE IN THE LEAD-UP OF 2018 GENERAL ELECTION 70 Elezioni - 2018 Mapping Italian News the one about the initiatives of the League against the law on the “ius soli” (birthright citizenship). Another cluster within the “policy issues” category is related to policy over health, specifically about the cancellation of the law on vaccination, that has been an object of great debate in Italy, both offline and on the social media. The last cluster in the policy issue concerned another central theme of the electoral campaign of Matteo Salvini, that is, the abrogation of the “Fornero law” on retirement pensions.

Three clusters of news stories are about “campaign issues”. The first cluster is about the Salvini’s swearing on the Gospel, an highly symbolic gesture that strengthen the conservative image of the League candidate, and traces a sacred boundary against immigrants from other religions. The other two clusters are related to the new political strategy of the League, that removed the “North” from its name to seek electoral support also in the south Italy.

The two clusters on “political issues” are about alliances with Silvio Berlusconi and Giorgia Meloni (Italy Brothers) and manifestation against him by anti-fascist groups. The last cluster, regarding “personal issues”, is indirectly concerned with immigration. It is about insults, violences and aggressions between politicians, and more specifically between Laura Boldrini, a left-wing politician who has become a symbols of the policies in favour of immigrations, and the League leader and his supporters.

Case studies The following section analyzes the news stories with the highest volume of interactions in the most engaging cluster for each candidate. The four news stories represent, each in its unique way, emblematic examples of issues

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that characterized the electoral campaign of the candidates and successfully catalyzed both audience and media attention.

In the case of Matteo Salvini the news story is a report on the “policy issue” of immigration, related to the racist raid in Macerata on February 3, 2018; in the case of Matteo Renzi is a “campaign issue” concerning the TV debate canceled by his M5S opponent after the electoral debacle of the Democratic Party in Sicily; in the case of Di Maio is a “personal issue” about his extra-political qualities, that have been targeted by the right-wing politician Vittorio Sgarbi, and lastly, in the case of Silvio Berlusconi, is a “political issue” pertaining his legal issues, which has become the main target of attacks coming from the Five Stars Movement leaders Luigi Di Maio and Alessandro Di Battista.

It is worth to notice that the two stories related to Renzi and Berlusconi also mention Five Stars Movement’s representatives. It is an additional evidence supporting the idea, already pointed out in previous sections, that M5S successfully shaped the media agendas about their opponents. Interestingly, the only case analyzed not mentioning the Movement is the racist raid of Macerata. In the attempt to avoid being labeled as extremist, the Five Stars Movement constantly keeped a low profile on divisive topics such immigration.

Beside representing relevant issues of each candidate and exemplifying some dynamics at plays between the candidates, the engagement these news stories reached on Facebook suggests that they were able to hit the users of this social media, probably because of political and socio-cultural reasons, including reasons specifically linked to Internet culture. Let’s look now more in depth at these news stories

Silvio Berlusconi and his legal issues The most engaging news story related to Silvio Berlusconi is a “political issue” concerning his relationship with the Mafia. It is an article published by fanpage. it two weeks before the election day – on February 24, 2018, and its title is: “Di Maio to Berlusconi: «We give our money to italian companies, you gave it to Cosa Nostra (“the Mafia”, ndr)»”. The article is mainly about the statements by Luigi Di Maio against Berlusconi. It is worth to notice that the murky past of the former Premier, his political power and his economic interests have made Berlusconi, rather than a political competitor, the very symbol of corruption that affects the political elite, according to the Five Stars Movement.

The headline of the article quotes the accusations of the Five Stars Movement candidate and no Berlusconi’s answer. This missing element is a key one in order to understand the role of Silvio Berlusconi in this news story: just an object of

MAPPING ITALIAN NEWS MEDIA POLITICAL COVERAGE IN THE LEAD-UP OF 2018 GENERAL ELECTION 72 Elezioni - 2018 Mapping Italian News communication, used as a term of comparison in order to talk about the Five Stars Movement, positioning and valorizing it by disqualifying, simultaneously, the competitor. So, we find a news story where a very prominent politician – Berlusconi – is dominated by the Five Stars Movement leader, who was capable to catch the spotlights and dominate the agenda. Di Maio didn’t had to arrange any sophisticated strategic move, he just referred to the court’s sentences on Berlusconi.

In this case, the populist rhetoric “us vs. them” also emerges. Following the headline we can see how the Five Stars Movement is depicted as honest and careful about citizens’ interests, while the candidate Berlusconi is described as a dishonest politician who didn’t care about the people, but just about his personal interest. Then, in the subheading, there is just a repetition of what already written in the headline, using longer quotes. Even in the subheading the main actor and the only voice who’s been reported is Luigi Di Maio’s.

The article is then organized in three sections: the first one, the introduction, presents the only topic of the headline, that is the controversy between Di Maio and Berlusconi; the second one is about Di Maio’s critics toward the Democratic Party; the third is about a video call between Di Maio and Di Battista which was uploaded online on their Instagram accounts.

In the first section there is a picture of Di Maio seated in the studio of a TV show and in the text the journalist explains, by quoting him, that his statements

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were an answer to the accusation by Silvio Berlusconi that Five Stars Movement “learned stealing in a short time”. The main themes around which those statements revolve are honesty and corruption, and it is interesting to notice that he talked about “stealing” as an activity that the Five Stars Movement “learned”, unwittingly implying that it is an usual activity in politics, while his opponents immediately used this attack in order to recall Berlusconi’s judiciary events, so to underline the difference between the M5S and the old political class.

In the second section, the reported quotes are about the Democratic Party and Forza Italia, described as not transparent, or in other words not completely honest. Honesty is a central theme in the political narratives of the Five Stars Movement, recurring several times as a key element. It is also worth to notice that the article, when mentioning statements from other politicians, does not report their quotes. Instead, they are mentioned by Di Maio himself or by a generic reference to external links. In this way the only protagonist is the candidate of the Five Stars Movement.

The last part of the article is about the video call between Di Maio and Di Battista, during which – it is reported by quotes – they comment the bad news coverage they got and how badly they were “attacked” by other parties. Then, the article ends with the announcement that they will present some names of their team during a TV show they will attend. Constructing the article in this way suggest implicitly that, despite all the criticisms and attacks from the other, dishonest, politicians, they are still going further, and they are the only hope of renewal of Italian politics.

Finally looking at the engagement structure of this news story we found that there are more reactions (68%) compared to the average volume of reactions of the news stories about Berlusconi (59%), and less comments (18% vs. 29%), while the shares are only a little above the average (14% vs 12%). The low volume of comments and the ratio between comments and the other metrics is perfectly aligned with the trend observed for negative stories covering the opponents of the Movement and thus back the analysis presented in the paragraph “Controversial News Stories and Cross-partisan Engagement”.

Di Maio and the provocation of Vittorio Sgarbi The most engaging news story related to Luigi Di Maio is not a traditional article but a video containing attacks to the M5S candidate that target his personal qualities. The source of this news story is InformazioneVera (“True Information”), and the news has been published on the election day - March 4, 2018. Its title is: “Sgarbi wishes death to Di Maio: «Shall your heart explode, broken ass». Then he insults Southern italy electors - WATCH AND SHARE”.

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This content is representative of the Di Maio’s campaign because he received many personal attacks from political opponents, mainly centred on personal accusations about his lack of instruction, competences and political experience. It also thematise a central point of the M5S programs, that is basic income. Indeed Sgarbi, a well-known art critic and right-wing politician, during the video offends Southern voters by accusing them of laziness and sloth, which would be strengthened by the basic income, according to him as well as to many others political opponents of the M5S.

This content is composed by just an headline, a video and a short description. Even though the video is published by InformazioneVera, it was originally created and shared online by Vittorio Sgarbi on his Facebook page. The operation of ripping off videos from their original context to republish them is a typical practice of clickbaiting driven websites. Another peculiarity of this kind of websites is the use of capital letters in the headline, to underline the urgency of a call to action – in this case, to invite the audience to watch and share the video.

In the video, Sgarbi insults Di Maio multiple times with a colorful language and the headline summarizes his statements and quotes the most powerful sentence in order to catch audience’s attention. Reading the short description following the video, however, it is possible to understand that the point of view is against Sgarbi, who “has to be denounced”. The contrast is about the Di Maio’s personal deficiencies alleged by an expert politician. According to this rhetoric old politicians have values and competencies while newcomers like Di Maio

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and most M5S leaders are unprepared and thus not suitable to lead a country. Exactly in reply to this kind of accusation, the M5S has organized an electoral campaign centred on “super-competent” candidates.

Vittorio Sgarbi was the direct competitor of Luigi Di Maio in the constituency of Pomigliano d’Arco in the Campania region of the south of Italy. It is worth to notice that Vittorio Sgarbi have builded, during his long career of TV-star art critic, a controversial image of himself, first through television and today through his videos on social media. On several occasions he publically used offensive language, excessive expressions and tones, which are today part of the public figure of Sgarbi: controversial, competent in art and provoking. For all this reasons, from the point of view of a M5S supporter, a sharp offensive critic coming from Vittorio Sgarbi lacks any real damaging potential and can be easily reframed. Nevertheless, the tactic used by InformazioneVera to exploit the popularity of Sgarbi to bolster the image of Five Stars Movement using a critical content produced by Sgarbi himself is revealing of the style of certain alternative news media sources.

In line to what observed in the previous sections (paragraph “Controversial News Stories and Cross-partisan Engagement”), this critical content toward M5S collected an unusually high proportion of comments (44.6%) both for Di Maio’s subset (32%) and for the entire dataset (26%). Furthermore, the share of comments pass those of reactions (43.8%) on this news story.

Matteo Renzi and the canceled TV debate The title of the most engaging news story related to the candidate Matteo Renzi is: “Di Maio cancels the TV debate with Renzi: «He’s not the competitor anymore». The secretary of the Democratic Party: «He’s afraid»”. This news story is emblematic of the categories of articles mentioning Matteo Renzi mainly because of the communicative dynamics it represents. The former prime minister appears here as a “victim” rather than a “protagonist”, due to the various attacks coming from political competitors both external and internal to his party. The criticism against the leader of the Democratic Party recurres in many other top engaging news stories related to Matteo Renzi, and just as he has been de-legitimized by the adversary, he has also been de-legitimized by some internal members of his party, during an unsuccessful electoral race.

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This news story was published by La Repubblica during the pre-campaign period. The clash between Di Maio and Renzi is represented by showing the Facebook posts by which they have communicated their positions, using a communicative style typical of the contemporary disintermediation and mediatization of politics. However, their intents and results are different: while Renzi has to defend himself from delegitimation, Di Maio declared his intent of withdrawal. So the first one acted passively, answering to the Five Stars Movement candidate who actively took a stand. Thus, Di Maio demonstrated again, in this news story, his power in leading the agenda and campaign’s crucial events, while Renzi appeared unable to answer to his attacks in a convincing way. The Democratic Party candidate is not the main character in this story, which is, once again, Di Maio, who referring to the electoral results obtained in the Sicily regional elections declares the “political death” of the PD.

The article tries to defend Renzi from his delegitimation in several ways, first of all by defining him, in the headline, as the “secretary of the Democratic Party”, then quoting politicians, close to him, who criticized Di Maio, trying to make him appear ridiculous, unprofessional and unprepared. Indeed, the article recalls other episodes where the M5S candidate decided to not participate in a TV debate, embedding two videos about the announcements made by the TV presenter about Di Maio’s absence. Moreover, one of those videos is related to a tweet made by a PD supporter who commented: “Michele Santoro19, Di

19 Michele Santoro is a prominent italian journalist, which has been Berlusconi’s main opponent on the public tv network Rai2 during Berlusconi’s government, who has also been dismissed by the network in 2002 because of his work and political orientation.

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Maio is not coming to your TV show because he’s afraid that a journalist would ask him some serious questions”. The theme of competence – which is, as we have already seen, one central theme in the critics moved to the Five Stars Movement by their opponents – is also adopted by Renzi, since he listed several relevant policy issues he would have liked to discuss with Di Maio. This was an attempt to be perceived as consistent, but Di Maio had a better lever: the very good results M5S obtained in the Sicily regional elections.

In an attempt of legitimate his leadership, Renzi also references the vast participation and transparency of the democratic primary elections for the PD secretary, in order to discredit the Five Stars Movement internal voting processes and software which is based an online platform where the Five Stars Movement’s electors can log in and vote for their candidates or for other issues. Using this quote the journalists gives resonance to the rhetoric clash “us vs. them”, where the Democratic Party is described as transparent and involved in the public interest, while the Five Stars Movement as not transparent and related to private interests, that is, those of the company which has the economics rights on the voting software. However, transparency and honesty are two main themes of M5S political narrative, on which they have built their communication strategy: since they have already colonized those concepts, using them against Di Maio may prove not effective enough.

This particular news story also carry the potential to show a broader trend. As we pointed out in the analysis of the headline and the article, the story show a clear political leaning toward the Democratic Party and specifically Matteo Renzi. La Repubblica itself is, in fact, often alleged to be leaning for PD. While not reaching the threshold, the MP-MPAS score obtained by the Democratic Party for La Repubblica is in fact the highest (see Figure 15). A look at the structure of the social media interactions around the “canceled TV debate” case helps to exemplify the drivers behind the attention dynamics of partisan online audiences.

Ones again we observe an article with positive coverage of an opponent of the Five Stars Movement receiving an unusual percentage of comments (49% vs the 31% of Renzi’s category and overall more comments than reactions - 41%). Nevertheless, ones we compare this case with the case of InformazioneVera discussed above we clearly see two different versions of the same strategy at stake. On the one hand, a negative content published by an opponent (Vittorio Sgarbi) on his Facebook page is embedded with a title that reframes its original meaning and re-shared by a news source close to the Movement that is therefore getting attention and traffic. On the other hand, an article carrying a negative coverage published by a news outlet considered hostile is commented and thus this source gets the attention. The different paths and ultimate beneficiary of the traffic generated by partisan communities explain the reasons why the

MAPPING ITALIAN NEWS MEDIA POLITICAL COVERAGE IN THE LEAD-UP OF 2018 GENERAL ELECTION 78 Elezioni - 2018 Mapping Italian News attention toward certain news source like La Repubblica is heterogeneous and pinpoint the role played by (and potential economic motivations of) hyper- partisan news-outlets such as InformazioneVera.

Matteo Salvini and the racist raid in Macerata The title of the most engaging news story related to the candidate Matteo Salvini is: “Macerata: who is Luca Traini, the 28 years old man who shot to African migrants. Northern League candidate in 2017”. It is an article about the racist shooting against African migrants by a far-right extremist, Luca Traini, happened in Macerata on February 3, 2018 – a month before the election day.

The article is representative of Matteo Salvini electoral campaign mainly because it is centred on migration policies, ideological closure and nationalistic values, which are some of the main traits that characterize Salvini’s campaign. His harsh anti-immigrant rhetoric is also the reasons why many intellectuals, journalists and political opponents has deemed him morally responsible for the violent action executed by Luca Traini.

The article has been published online, on the same day of the shooting, by “Il Fatto Quotidiano” and outlines a personal profile of the shooter, thus immediately satisfying the natural curiosity of the readers. In the headline, the journalist presents a connection between the League of Matteo Salvini and his immigration policies: a successful journalistic strategy, since this is one of the main frame that characterized all the debate about the episode. The article also reports the rumor (that turned out to be false) about Traini’s relationship with Pamela Mastropietro, a girl who has been killed and whose corpse has been dismembered allegedly by a group of Nigerian immigrants few days before in the same city where Traini performed his raid. According to a representative of the regional League, quoted in the article, this relationship could be the real reason for the racist raid: private revenge, thus, rather than ideology20. Another frame presented in the articles points to the possible mental illness of the man. This idea is introduced by an interviewed close to Traini that tried to humanize and “justify” his violent and racist behaviour, relieving Traini from his complete responsibility by constructing around him a rhetoric of the mentally ill man who has had a difficult life. However, for the same reason, the readers can also believe that he could be, as the interviewee said, “corrupted by wrong ideas”.

20 Few days after the publication of this article, the press reported a statement by Traini himself to police that clarify the motivation behind the shooting made: “I wanted to revenge Pamela and do something against immigration, because the phenomenon of illegal immigration should be suppressed”.

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While at a first glance this piece appears as a portrait of the shooter, it also carry a precise narrative that attempts to understate the issue of immigration while at the same time underlines the association of the shooter with the League and its leader Matteo Salvini. Indeed, in the article the League is represented negatively in two different ways: as the moral instigator who takes advantages of the fragility of certain individuals to corrupt them with “wrong ideas”, and as a factious and unreliable political force, ready to say anything (back the rumor of the love relationship with the victim) in order to “wash its hands” of the responsibility for the event. During the same hours, as pointed out by the online traces left on 4chan and 8chan /pol/ boards, far-right online extremists were at work to push an alternative narrative depicting Traini as an anti-migrant hero21.

The news stories about Salvini reached, in general, an higher rate of reactions (65%) compared to shares (9%) and comments (26%). However, in the case of this article, though the highest rate is always reached by reactions (50%) and shares represents the lowest percentage (9%), we can see an increase in comments rate (41%). Despite the highly controversiality of the topic, the share of comments on this news story is lower than what we observed for Renzi and Di Maio cases. Il Fatto Quotidiano, a relatively new but successful news outlet, is often considered to be leaning to the Five Stars Movement.

21 Ebner, J., & Davey, J. (2018). MAINSTREAMING MUSSOLINI How the Extreme Right Attempted to “Make Italy Great Again” in the 2018 Italian Election. Institute for Strategic Dialogue.

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Appendix 1: Methods The analysis presented in this report are based upon a set of different methodological approaches applied to multiple sources of data.

News Stories and Media Sources The project aimed at creating a comprehensive map of the political news coverage created by the Italian traditional and alternative online news media in the lead up of 2018 general election With this aim in mind, we designed, prototyped and deployed a technological infrastructure aimed at collecting, in real time, a comprehensive dataset of news stories around Italian politics published between 1st of September 2017 and 4th of March 2018.

The backbone of the infrastructure is based on an open source software called Huginn. Similarly to the now discontinued Yahoo!Pipes, Huginn22 is a general purpose system for building agents that perform automated tasks online. In the scenario designed for this project, a set of agents periodically collects the news stories, measure their social media engagement and interact with the database to store this data.

The news stories are collected from three sources: Google News, the Global Database of Society (GDELT)23 and Twitter. A set of agents periodically query Google News RSS feed for news-stories related to Italian politics24, post a request to GDELT API for the latest political news-stories published by Italian news sources located in Italy25 and consume Twitter streaming API filtered for tweets including a link and mentioning a candidate or a political party (see note 5). Another agent is in charge of deduplicating the list of collected URLs and filtering out news in languages other than Italian (via Google Language API).

The final dataset consists of 84,815 URLs (news stories) from 4,113 unique domains (media sources).

22 https://github.com/huginn/huginn. 23 https://www.gdeltproject.org/. 24 We specifically used the following Google News topics: Centro-sinistra in Italia, Centro- destra in Italia, Unione di Centro, Insieme, +Europa, , , Giuliano Pisapia, Campo Progressista, Matteo Salvini, Silvio Berlusconi, Luigi di Maio, Matteo Renzi, Forza Nuova, , Articolo 1 – Movimento democratico e progressista, Liberi e Uguali, Pietro Grasso, Fratelli d’Italia, Forza Italia, , Partito Democratico e Movimento 5 Stelle. 25 GDELT automatically categorize news stories. We specifically query stories for the following categories: LEGISLATION, LEADER, GENERAL_GOVERNMENT and USPEC_POLITICS_ GENERAL1.

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Facebook Data The list of URLs resulting from the collection was then matched with the Facebook Open Graph object that is canonically associated with an external URL (og_object). Using this unique identifier, we also collected the news story title, description, type (article, video, website, etc) and datetime of publication.

The list of og_object was also used to query, via a dedicated Huginn agent, the Facebook Graph API URL endpoint to periodically collect the global number of Facebook comments, reactions (a metric that includes likes and all the new reactions) and shares. More specifically, the social media lifecycle of a news- story was followed every two hours for an entire week (starting from the date and time the story was published). On average, the volume of Facebook interactions around a URL was observed 80.23 times per news story for a grand total of 4,906,999 observations.

Twitter Data Beside the dataset of news stories with respective Facebook engagement, we also collected and analyzed two additional Twitter datasets. Using Twitter Enterprise search API via DiscoverText, we collected the retweets of Italian politicians and political parties26 during January 2018. Using DMI-TCAT we also followed the Twitter timelines of the top 5,000 contributors in the retweet dataset and collected tweets published by this users between February 1 and the March 4, 2018. We extracted and resolved the nearly 1.3 hundred million URLs that were shared by these tweets to estimate the network structure of the different media sources and measure the attention devoted to different sources by partisan Twitter users.

These two datasets respectively consisted of 216,765 and 4,385,877 tweets.

Multi Party Media Partisanship Attention Score Building upon the Media Partisanship Attention Scores (MPAS) developed by Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, Hal Roberts, and Ethan Zuckerman for their study on media landscape during the US Presidential Election, we relayed on Twitter data to characterize the political leaning of a news source. The partisanship scores served an important role in their analysis allowing the authors to identify and describe patterns of attention among supporters of the major party candidates for different media sources.

26 We specifically collected tweets that matched a “retweets_of:” rule for the following Twitter accounts: luigidimaio, matteorenzi, matteosalvinimi, forza_italia, giorgiameloni, giulianopisapia, angealfa, berlusconi, pbersani, articolounomdp, pdnetwork, leganordpadania, beppe_grillo, mov5stelle, fratelliditaiia, campoprog, si_sinistra, alternativa_pop, nfratoianni, possibileit, civati, noiconsalvini, maurizioacerbo, direzioneprc, pietrograsso, robersperanza, lauraboldrini, paologentiloni, emmabonino, radicali, liberi_uguali, verditalia, insieme2018, partsocialista, piu_europa, potere_alpopolo, LegaSalvini, bealorenzin, civica_popolare.

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Designed for the US bipolar political context, the original score metric is based on the frequency of sharing media sources among users who retweeted messages from either of the two general election candidates (@realdonadtrump and @hillaryclinton). The general idea is to categorize users first (based on the proportion of their retweets) and then in turn categorize the news source they shared. Mapping the two candidates on the left-to-right ideological scale, the original MPAS metric, expressed on a -1.0 to 1.0 scale, allowed the authors to categorize the news source in five categories (left, centre-left, centre, centre- right and right). In order to adapt this method to the multi-party Italian context we developed a variation of this score named Multi Party Media Partisanship Attention Score (MP-MPAS). Our adaptation is based on the frequency of sharing media sources among users who retweeted messages from at least one of the account listed in Table 7 aggregated per party and the tweets created by the top 5,000 contributors in the retweet dataset.

Coalition Party Account M5S M5S luigidimaio Centre-left PD matteorenzi Centre-right LN matteosalvinimi Centre-right FI forza_italia Centre-right FdI giorgiameloni NA CP giulianopisapia NA AP angealfa Centre-right FI berlusconi LeU LeU pbersani LeU LeU articolounomdp Centre-left PD pdnetwork Centre-right LN leganordpadania M5S M5S beppe_grillo M5S M5S mov5stelle Centre-right FdI fratelliditaiia NA CP campoprog LeU LeU si_sinistra NA AP alternativa_pop LeU LeU nfratoianni LeU LeU possibileit LeU LeU civati Centre-right LN noiconsalvini

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Coalition Party Account PP PP maurizioacerbo PP PP direzioneprc LeU LeU pietrograsso LeU LeU robersperanza LeU LeU lauraboldrini Centre-left PD paologentiloni Centre-left Piu_Europa emmabonino Centre-left Piu_Europa radicali LeU LeU liberi_uguali Centre-left Insieme verditalia Centre-left Insieme insieme2018 Centre-left Insieme partsocialista Centre-left Piu_Europa piu_europa Centre-left Civica_popolare bealorenzin Centre-left Civica_popolare civica_popolare Centre-right LN legasalvini PP PP potere_alpopolo Table 7: Twitter official account of politician and political parties with respective party and coalition associations

The underlying data extracted for this purpose included 3,950 users and 3,500,575 of their tweets with links, wich cited 19,274 unique domains27.

We then used the proportion of retweets associated with each party for each media source as a measure of the party-centric partisanship. We thus obtained a metric expressed on a 0.0 to 1.0 scale for each media source and party. A media source that was included only in the tweets of users that retweeted the accounts associated with the Five Stars Movement, received a score of one for that party. On the other hand, a media source that was never mentioned in the tweets of users that retweeted the accounts associated with the Five Stars Movement, received a score of 0 for that party.

We thus ended up with a set of ten scores28 for each media source. Using these scores, we proceeded to adjudicate the media source to the party with the

27 Removing domains of social media platforms such as facebook.com, twitter.com, instagram.com, youtube.com or services such as spotify.com, docs.google.com or newsstand. google.com resulted in a sudden drop to 597,509 tweets created by 3,814 users confirming that most of the link shared on Twitter points to Twitter itself or other social media platforms and services. 28 Democratic Party (PD), Five Stars Movement (M5S), Forza Italia (FI), League (Lega), Brothers of Italy (FdI), Insieme, +Europa (Piu_Europa), Civica Popolare (Civica_popolare), Potere al Popolo (PP), Free and Equal (LeU).

MAPPING ITALIAN NEWS MEDIA POLITICAL COVERAGE IN THE LEAD-UP OF 2018 GENERAL ELECTION 84 Elezioni - 2018 Mapping Italian News highests score if this score exceeded the threshold of 0.33. Media sources with a maximum score of less than 0.33 were intead added to the “Cross-partisan” category. In other terms, when a media source is adjudicated to a party, it means that the source received an attention that was significantly partisan (mainly concentrated among users who retweeted that party). On the other hand, a media source was attributed to the “Cross-partisan” category when it was shared by an etheorgenous audience.

Finally, we joined the list of media source with the MP-MPAS and adjudication with the list of unique domains collected with respective Facebook aggregated engagement (sum, average, standard deviation) ending up with a list of 628 news media sources that appeared in both lists.

N. of media sources Party adjudicated Lega 215 M5S 177 Mixed 107 PD 68 LeU 51 PP 4 FI 4 Piu_Europa 1 Insieme 1 Civica_popolare 0 FdI 0 All 628 Table 8: Distribution of media sources adjudicated to different category via MP-MPAS

Unlike our American colleagues, we were unable to use the Media Partisanship Attention Score to create a continuous measure of party-centric partisan attention to be mapped on a left-to-right ideological scale due to the presence in the Italian context of the Five Stars Movement. Both M5S leaders and a large share of their voters openly reject the idea to position the Movement on this ideological scale29. Furthermore, M5S electoral program includes both a proposal for a universal basic income, a tax cut and public debt reduction30.

Network Mapping of Media Sources As an intermediate step toward constructing the Multi Party Media Partnership Attention Score, we organized our data as a bi-partite network connecting

29 Bordignon, F., & Ceccarini, L. (2013). Five Stars and a Cricket. Beppe Grillo Shakes Italian Politics. South European Society & Politics, 18(4), 427–449. 30 https://www.ilblogdellestelle.it/2018/01/20_punti_per_la_qualita_della_vita_degli_ italiani.html (in Italian).

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Twitter users with the media sources they have retweeted. This bi-partite network was then projected into a weighted undirected network, connecting media sources that have been shared by the same users and with the weight of the connection representing the number of users who shared both sources. The initial bipartite network contained 4,458 nodes (3,740 users and 628 media sources) and 103,029 edges. This projected into a network of media-media connections counting 628 nodes and 154,368 edges.This projected network is, as expected, extremely densely connected (graph density: 0.78).

The overall volume of Facebook interactions per day was used in connection to text mining and cluster analysis to identify the most salient news topics in the months leading to the election day and the most talked about topics related to one of the fours main political leaders.

To describe the long road to the elections day, we identified the ten days with greater Facebook engagement both in the pre-electoral campaign period (from September 1, 2017 until January 31, 2018) and in the electoral campaign period (from February 1, 2017 until March 4, 2018). We ordered the news stories of each day by their engagement and then we selected all the news stories until we reached a cumulative frequency of 75% of the total engagement of the day. According to this method we have extracted 405 news stories in the pre- electoral campaign period, and 384 in the electoral campaign period. We then classified the news titles and descriptions of these news stories according to the categories of “political issues”, “policy issues”, “campaign issues”, “personal issues”. We borrowed our issue classification from Patterson (1980)31. Despite some problems in the definition of the semantic borders between these categories, this analytical tool proved to be adequate to monitor Italian electoral campaign since 1983 (Grossi, Mancini, Mazzoleni 1985; Marini, Roncarolo 1997; Iannelli, Giglietto 2015)32. We defined as “political issues” those issues concerning the dynamics of the political system, the relations between its key players, and the more abstract spheres of the political competitions. We considered as “policy issues” those issues related to the concrete problems that affect citizens closely and that the political system may face through specific interventions/ solutions. We classified as “personal issues” those issues concerning the leaders/ candidates’ private life and their extra-political activities. Lastly, we labelled “campaign issues” those issues related to the strategic and organizational aspect of the electoral campaign. Within these macro categories, leveraging on previous research on the Italian General elections and considering what

31 Patterson, T. E. (1980). The mass media election: How Americans choose their president. New York, NY: Praeger. 32 Grossi, G., Mancini, P., & Mazzoleni, G. (1984). Giugno 1983: Una campagna elettorale. Turin: ERI; Marini, R., & Roncarolo, F. (1997). I media come arena elettorale. Le elezioni politiche 1996 in Tv e nei giornali. Rome: ERI; Iannelli, L., & Giglietto, F. (2015),Hybrid spaces of politics: the 2013 general , between talk shows and Twitter. Information, Communication & Society, 18:9, 1006–1021

MAPPING ITALIAN NEWS MEDIA POLITICAL COVERAGE IN THE LEAD-UP OF 2018 GENERAL ELECTION 86 Elezioni - 2018 Mapping Italian News emerged from our data, we identified diverse micro issues.

As regards “political issues”, we identified the following micro issues: institutional candidacies/government formulas, ideological visions between fascism and anti-fascism, alliances/coalitions/governability, intra-coalition problems, legal issues/corruption/legislative actions against corruption, renewals of parties and their political actors, problems between politicians and journalists, and other.

With respect to “policy issues”, we identified the following micro-issues: laws/ reforms related to political class’s privileges, immigration, economics/fiscal policy, interventions for the victims of earthquakes, civil rights, school/university, local administration, electoral reform, europe, health, pensions, labor, security, pollution/environment, and other.

We declined “personal issues” in two micro issues, that is, the personal qualities/ competences/extra-political activities of the candidate/leader and the personal insults/violences/aggressions between politicians.

As for “campaign issues”, we identified the following micro-issues: candidates’ choice/lists’ formation/assignment to the voting district, campaign activities/ management, polls/comments on the results of local elections, slogan/spot/ satire, campaign’s rules, and other.

Given the presence of news stories that reported accounts related to some of these macro and micro issues or other topics without any reference to the Italian political campaign or candidates/parties/coalitions/ideologies, we added the category of “news report”. The micro-issues of “news reports” emerging from data concerned: racists insults/crimes involving immigrants; statistics on immigration and positive portraits of immigrants; female murders/bullying/vandals/gunfire/ crashes; statistics (national debt, employments, health, instruction, justifiable homicide); foreign leader/policies; events involving professors and parents at school; movies and TV programmes about cultural heritage, Mussolini, and homosexuals; scientific events/pollution; layoffs/underpaid workers/insufficient pensions; episodes of corruption/insolvency involving businessmen; terrorist attacks in other countries; and other.

To identify the top topics related to each of the main candidates, we started by splitting our dataset of news stories in four subsets of news stories related to each one of them, and performing a set of text pre-processing steps necessary for an effective cluster analysis. Using the “quanteda” package (R), we identified and merge proper names (names and surnames) and compounded names of political parties by identifying capitalized terms and performing a “collocations” analysis - that is, the analysis of the sequences of words or terms that co-occur more often than would be expected by chance. Then, using R functions we

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converted words to lowercase, removed punctuation and numbers, and filtered out the most common italian grammatical words (“stop-words”) which have not enough semantical value in the documents and discriminating power between the documents, using the stopwords list provided by the “tm” package. We also removed “noise” in documents using, again, the analysis of collocations to identify patterns of words without semantic values related to the news stories content, that could have disturbed the cluster analysis, removing them. Lastly, using the text mining “quanteda” package, we performed a “stemming” process to remove derivational affixes and aggregate similar terms written in different forms, and transformed the cleaned dataset of texts in a document-term matrix, where rows correspond to the news stories and columns to their terms, using “term frequency-inverse document frequency” statistics as weighting factor. After removing all the terms not occurring in at least two documents, we computed a distance matrix based on cosine similarity using the “proxy” package, and finally we performed a cluster analysis on the news stories using the K-Means algorithm on that matrix, using “factoextra” package.

We extracted ten clusters in each months for each candidate. Among them, we selected the clusters with a greater quality using the “silhouette” method, extracting all the clusters with an average silhouette width greater that the global average silhouette width. Lastly, we selected the top ten most significant clusters of news stories of each candidate using a double relevance criteria: one related to their relevance for the media, the other related to their relevance for the social media audience, by considering the number of news included in the cluster and the engagement they reached on Facebook.

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Appendix 2: Top 25 News

Total Title Source Published N° Reactions N° Comments N° Shares Engagement

Sanremo 2018 - Pierfrancesco Favino YouTube 2/10/2018 329,972 39,750 64,217 433,939 emoziona con il monologo “La notte...”

76.04% 9.16% 14.80% 100%

Claudio Baglioni ha donato 700.000 euro alle vittime del terremoto: “Le mie ViaggiNews 2/12/2018 247,428 46,823 37489 331,740 radici affondano qui”

74.58% 14.11% 11.30% 100%

Le bollette elettriche non pagate saranno (in parte) a carico degli altri IlSole24Ore 2/14/2018 109,351 73,744 49,057 232,152 utenti

47.10% 31.77% 21.13% 100%

Il biotestamento è legge dello Stato: via La Repubblica 12/14/2017 135,064 9,736 22,435 167,235 libera definitivo al Senato con 180 sì

80.76% 5.82% 13.42% 100%

Il tribunale di Roma dà ragione Il Blog a Virginia Raggi: notizie di reato 2/20/2018 115,034 8,964 21,554 145,552 delle Stelle infondate!

79.03% 6.16% 14.81% 100%

Sicilia: trovate 500 mila schede precompilate. Ne verranno stampate Il Fatto 3/3/2018 58,933 47,232 35,896 142,061 di nuove.

41.48% 33.25% 25.27% 100%

Il pomodoro di Pachino schiacciato dai trattati Ue. Gli agricoltori: “Raccoglierlo Il Fatto 2/11/2018 86,065 18,211 36,321 140,597 non conviene. La politica ci prende per Quotidiano i fondelli”

61.21% 12.95% 25.83% 100%

Peppina se ne va in lacrime: “Sono una persona onesta”. La figlia: “Oggi muore Cronache Maceratesi 9/30/2017 95,141 25,008 17,342 137,491 lo Stato”

69.20% 18.19% 12.61% 100.00%

Biotestamento è legge: il Senato approva tra gli applausi. Welby, Englaro, Il Fatto Quotidiano 12/14/2017 92,932 4,617 13,409 110,958 Fabo: la politica cede dopo 11 anni

83.75% 4.16% 12.08% 100.00%

Se due centesimi a busta vi sembrano Rolling Stones 1/4/2018 77,558 13,194 13,492 104,244 troppi, non venite più a Bali

74.40% 12.66% 12.94% 100.00%

Deputato M5s va a donare il sangue ma Lercio 2/19/2018 75,913 11,200 9,691 96,804 poi se lo riprende

78.42% 11.57% 10.01% 100.00%

Diciottenne romana fatta a pezzi e chiusa nelle valigie, fermato spacciatore Il Messaggero 2/1/2018 57,234 29,205 9,425 95,864 nigeriano: trovati vestiti della ragazza e tracce di sangue

59.70% 30.47% 9.83% 100.00%

Peppina se ne va in lacrime: “Sono una persona onesta”. La figlia: “Oggi muore Inews24 9/30/2017 62,081 17,904 10,405 90,390 lo Stato”

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Total Title Source Published N° Reactions N° Comments N° Shares Engagement

68.68% 19.81% 11.51% 100.00%

E’ morto Totò Riina, il ‘capo dei capi’. Il La Repubblica 11/17/2017 62,333 14,881 12,218 89,432 boss mafioso da 24 anni era al 41 bis

69.70% 16.64% 13.66% 100.00%

Renzi: “Ottimo risultato del PD, se confrontato con quello delle elezioni Lercio 3/4/2018 73,750 6,187 8,935 88,872 del 1937”

82.98% 6.96% 10.05% 100.00%

Sacchetti di plastica a pagamento: Informare per 1/2/2018 50,319 23,275 14,703 88,297 inizia la “resistenza” degli italiani resistere

56.99% 26.36% 16.65% 100.00%

Senatore massacrato di botte da due 10/18/2017 Italia24ore 57,368 18,254 11,566 87,188 disoccupati

65.80% 20.94% 13.27% 100.00%

Una scuola che non boccia è una scuola marcia. Crepet, vogliamo il male di chi 11/13/2017 Orizzonte Scuola 62,881 6,356 15,998 85,235 abbiamo messo al mondo

73.77% 7.46% 18.77% 100.00%

Pd, il treno di Renzi viaggia in incognito: per evitare proteste e insulti a ogni Il Fatto 10/26/2017 54,895 15,089 13,641 83,625 fermata si cancellano programma e Quotidiano date

65.64% 18.04% 16.31% 100.00%

La tassa sui sacchetti di plastica fa ricca 12/31/2017 Il Giornale 38,890 26,038 17,791 82,719 la manager renziana

47.01% 31.48% 21.51% 100.00%

La ministra Fedeli: “Genitori, andate a prendere i vostri figli a scuola fino alla 10/26/2017 La Repubblica 46,343 28,674 6,180 81,197 media”

57.07% 35.31% 7.61% 100.00%

Berlusconi contestato a seggio da una 3/4/2018 Ansa 48,821 21,785 9,583 80,189 Femen

60.88% 27.17% 11.95% 100.00%

La prof ai poliziotti: «Dovete morire, Corriere.it 2/27/2018 40,576 27,828 7,849 76,253 vigliacchi». Renzi: «Va licenziata» (Torino)

53.21% 36.49% 10.29% 100.00%

Un pm spiega perché il nero senza 2/13/2018 Rolling Stones 47,378 14,523 13,022 74,923 biglietto non è il problema

63.24% 19.38% 17.38% 100.00%

Ultima proiezione: aumenta il numero 3/4/2018 Lercio 63,228 3,309 5,869 72,406 degli italiani all’estero

87.32% 4.57% 8.11% 100.00% Table 9: Top 25 news stories

MAPPING ITALIAN NEWS MEDIA POLITICAL COVERAGE IN THE LEAD-UP OF 2018 GENERAL ELECTION 90 Elezioni - 2018 Mapping Italian News

Appendix 3: Top 25 Media Sources

Average Total Total Total Domain N° Articles Engagement Typology Reactions Comments Shares per Article

ilblogdellestelle.it 434 2268301 267774 520793 7043.474654 Party site

beppegrillo.it 411 1271757 170586 305051 4251.56691 Party site News repubblica.it 1040 2564564 1226286 585461 4207.991346 organization News ilfattoquotidiano.it 3060 5422744 2172615 1299281 2906.745098 organization News corriere.it 1123 1408876 688082 285287 2121.322351 organization News fanpage.it 752 737943 672635 87450 1992.058511 organization News lastampa.it 1426 1552640 829120 347150 1913.681627 organization News ilgiornale.it 1682 1777273 851511 328603 1758.256243 organization News ilpopulista.it 673 760276 299776 100738 1724.799406 organization News video.repubblica.it 328 329086 159285 53779 1652.896341 organization News huffingtonpost.it 1586 1352628 792015 255272 1513.187264 organization News tgcom24.mediaset.it 939 871166 336028 120564 1414.01278 organization News ilmessaggero.it 794 594237 338141 121328 1327.085642 organization

democratica.com 379 246345 104856 43615 1041.730871 Party site

News ilmattino.it 446 267694 126384 44245 982.7869955 organization News 2281 1113566 620226 230982 861.3651907 ansa.it organization News ilsole24ore.com 471 234972 87389 53222 797.4161359 organization News orizzontescuola.it 365 170101 63736 37017 742.0657534 organization News secoloditalia.it 671 281909 137972 63933 721.0342772 organization News giornalettismo.com 372 135870 85040 28564 670.6290323 organization

piovegovernoladro.info 640 205114 143682 65520 647.36875 Hyper-partisan

News it.blastingnews.com 424 134128 112515 24893 640.4150943 Aggregator News nextquotidiano.it 925 300821 196489 72839 616.3772973 organization News affaritaliani.it 1152 394729 192108 88923 586.5972222 organization News rainews.it 362 120168 65615 26152 585.4558011 organization Table 10: Top 25 most productive 1% of media sources

| LARICA AT UNIVERSITÀ DI URBINO CARLO BO | FULL REPORT 91 Elezioni - 2018 Mapping Italian News

Average Total Total N° Articles Total Comments Engagement Typology Domain Reactions Shares per Article

informazionevera.it 47 211782 72362 47488 7056 Hyper-partisan

5stellenews.com 80 295576 53345 59184 5101.3125 Hyper-partisan

News milano.repubblica.it 105 315660 145763 56117 4928.952381 organization

News torino.repubblica.it 111 275969 116189 47276 3958.864865 organization

direttanfo.blogspot.it 39 97059 15251 39190 3884.615385 Hyper-partisan

ilfastidioso.myblog.it 61 153298 36045 43363 3814.852459 Hyper-partisan

News youmedia.fanpage.it 61 148088 33233 40217 3631.770492 organization

News espresso.repubblica.it 138 283307 128460 75783 3532.971014 organization

News torino.corriere.it 45 84103 50014 15010 3313.933333 organization

silenziefalsita.it 122 259730 74148 66008 3277.754098 Hyper-partisan

News milanotoday.it 40 85735 27421 11292 3111.2 organization

News bologna.repubblica.it 72 121615 62415 17326 2796.611111 organization

News 252 425979 166795 102395 2758.607143 palermo.repubblica.it organization

News firenze.repubblica.it 58 91000 44959 18490 2662.913793 organization

News m.ilgiornale.it 130 199208 87103 42951 2532.784615 organization

News roma.repubblica.it 158 208666 125993 51221 2442.278481 organization

News liberoquotidiano.it 117 174259 67064 38777 2394.017094 organization

tg-news24.com 86 100549 56663 41189 2306.988372 Hyper-partisan

News youreporter.it 57 75195 22543 28016 2206.210526 organization

News bari.repubblica.it 51 64153 23847 12723 1974.960784 organization

News ilprimatonazionale.it 142 168032 73364 36345 1955.922535 organization

riscattonazionale.net 47 47031 31226 13434 1950.87234 Hyper-partisan

voxnews.info 62 58812 37165 23195 1922.129032 Hyper-partisan

fattidalweb.com 109 126348 49778 33201 1920.431193 notfound

News tv.ilpopulista.it 62 84100 20704 13838 1913.580645 organization

Table 11: Top 25 most productive 10% media sources

MAPPING ITALIAN NEWS MEDIA POLITICAL COVERAGE IN THE LEAD-UP OF 2018 GENERAL ELECTION 92 Elezioni - 2018 Mapping Italian News

Appendix 4: Classification of news stories

News Story Engagement Macro-Issue Micro - issue (N=405) (N=3,880,447)

Campaign Campaign activities/management 11.60% 9.67% issue

Candidates’ choice/lists’ formation/assignment to 14.81% 8.29% the voting district

Other 0.25% 0.53%

Polls/comments on the results of local elections 5.93% 4.22%

Slogan/spot/satire 0.74% 1.70%

Total campaign 33.33% 24.41% issue

Policy Civil rights 2.47% 11.96%

Economics/fiscal policy 3.70% 4.29%

Immigration 5.93% 5.31%

Interventions for the victims of earthquakes 1.98% 9.38%

Laws/reforms related to political class’s privileges 4.20% 3.29%

Local administration 2.72% 2.17%

Other 4.94% 5.18%

School/university 0.49% 2.26%

Total policy 26.42% 43.83%

Alliances/coalitions/governability 2.22% 1.56% Political

Fascism/antifascism 1.98% 1.43%

Institutional candidacies/government formulas 1.98% 0.78%

Intra-coalition problems 4.44% 2.89%

Legal issues/corruption/legislative actions against 8.64% 8.14% corruption

Other 2.22% 1.37%

Total political 21.48% 16.16%

| LARICA AT UNIVERSITÀ DI URBINO CARLO BO | FULL REPORT 93 Elezioni - 2018 Mapping Italian News

News Story Engagement Macro-Issue Micro - issue (N=405) (N=3,880,447)

Personal Insults/violences/aggressions between politicians. 1.48% 1.09%

Qualities/competences/extra-political activities of 8.40% 6.12% the candidate/leader

Total personal 9.88% 7.21%

Events involving professors and parents at school 0.25% 1.09% News report

Female murders/bullying/vandals/gunfire/crashes 0.49% 0.14%

Foreign leader/policies 0.99% 0.85%

Layoffs/underpaid workers/insufficient pensions 0.49% 0.28%

Movies and TV programmes about cultural 0.74% 0.50% heritage, Mussolini, and homosexuals

Other 0.99% 0.43%

Racists insults/crimes involving immigrants 1.73% 2.40%

Scientific events/Pollution 0.49% 0.67%

Statistics (national debt, employments, health, 1.48% 0.76% instruction, justifiable homicide

Statistics on immigration and positive portraits of 0.49% 0.57% immigrants

Terrorist attacks in other countries 0.49% 0.62%

Total news 8.64% 8.31% report

Other 0.25% 0.07%

Total other 0.25% 0.07%

Total 100.00% 100.00% Table 12: Classification of the most engaging news stories published in the ten days with most engagement in the pre-electoral period

MAPPING ITALIAN NEWS MEDIA POLITICAL COVERAGE IN THE LEAD-UP OF 2018 GENERAL ELECTION 94 Elezioni - 2018 Mapping Italian News

News Story Engagement Macro-Issue Micro - issue (N=384) (N=6,600,787)

Political Alliances/coalitions/governability 3.65% 1.47%

Fascism/antifascism 8.33% 8.21%

Institutional candidacies/government formulas 11.98% 8.48%

Intra-coalition problems 1.30% 0.51%

Legal issues/corruption/legislative actions against 21.09% 20.50% corruption

Other 3.13% 2.18%

Total political 49.48% 41.36%

Policy Civil rights 0.78% 1.09%

Economics/fiscal policy 3.65% 5.34%

Immigration 8.85% 9.61%

Laws/reforms related to political class’s privileges 0.26% 0.24%

Local administration 4.43% 3.21%

Other 3.39% 2.33%

School/university 2.08% 1.23%

Total policy 23.44% 23.06%

Campaign Campaign activities/management 5.99% 3.02% issue

Candidates’ choice/lists’ formation/assignment to 1.56% 0.95% the voting district

Other 0.52% 0.55%

Polls/comments on the results of local elections 3.13% 2.24%

Slogan/spot/satire 1.04% 1.10%

Total campaign 12.24% 7.85% issue

Episodes of corruption/insolvency involving News report 0.78% 0.42% businessmen

| LARICA AT UNIVERSITÀ DI URBINO CARLO BO | FULL REPORT 95 Elezioni - 2018 Mapping Italian News

News Story Engagement Macro-Issue Micro - issue (N=384) (N=6,600,787)

Events involving professors and parents at school 0.78% 0.57%

Female murders/bullying/vandals/gunfire/crashes 1.56% 1.39%

Layoffs/underpaid workers/insufficient pensions 0.52% 1.27%

Movies and TV programmes about cultural 0.26% 0.18% heritage, Mussolini, and homosexuals

Other 1.56% 7.10%

Racists insults/crimes involving immigrants 1.82% 3.99%

Scientific events/pollution 0.52% 0.47%

Statistics (national debt, employments, health, 0.26% 0.46% instruction, justifiable homicide

Statistics on immigration and positive portraits of 0.52% 6.68% immigrants

Total news 8.59% 22.54% report

Personal Insults/violences/aggressions between politicians. 0.52% 0.15%

Qualities/competences/extra-political activities of 4.43% 2.60% the candidate/leader

Total personal 4.95% 2.76%

Other Other 1.30% 2.43%

Total other 1.30% 2.43%

Total 100.00% 100.00% Table 13: Classification of the most engaging news stories published in the ten days with most engagement in the electoral period

MAPPING ITALIAN NEWS MEDIA POLITICAL COVERAGE IN THE LEAD-UP OF 2018 GENERAL ELECTION 96 Elezioni - 2018 Mapping Italian News

Appendix 5: Overall statistics on Facebook reactions, comments and shares

Reactions Comments Shares Total engagement

Absolute values 39,818,195 16,874,919 8,739,960 65,433,074

Percentage 60.85% 25.79% 13.36% 100.00% Table 14: Facebook reactions, comments, shares and total engagement in absolute and percentage values in the whole dataset (N=84815)

Reactions Comments Shares

Reactions 1.00 0.72 0.88

Comments 0.72 1.00 0.74

Shares 0.88 0.74 1.00 Table 15: Pearson’s correlation between Facebook reactions, comments and shares in the whole dataset (N=84815)

| LARICA AT UNIVERSITÀ DI URBINO CARLO BO | FULL REPORT 97 Elezioni - 2018 Mapping Italian News

MAPPING ITALIAN NEWS MEDIA POLITICAL COVERAGE IN THE LEAD-UP OF 2018 GENERAL ELECTION 98 elezioni2018.news

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SUPPORTED BY A GRANT FROM THE FOUNDATION OPEN SOCIETY INSTITUTE IN COOPERATION WITH THE INFORMATION PROGRAM OF THE OPEN SOCIETY FOUNDATIONS