Conclusion

For our study about the 2018 Italian Elections, we started from the assumption that Facebook is not an efficient democratic platform. Due to the personalized user experience, executed by algorithms and based on the users’ personal interests, we assumed that Facebook would give to the users only their own perspective on politics. This phenomenon already happened during the 2016 US Elections through the spread of fake news. In order to test our assumptions, we decided to focus on the context of the 2018 Italian Elections. In particular, we analyzed the comments to the post the Facebook pages of Matteo Renzi, Luigi Di Maio and Matteo Salvini. Our hypothesis was that the comments to the posts of political leaders mirror the themes and the rhetoric present by each of their political platforms. As we have seen through our data analysis and visualization, comments do reflect the rhetoric and the themes of their political leaders. It has to be noted, however, that they didn’t cover all of the topics that we expected. As they repeated some of their discourse, they didn’t necessary discussed about some of the main themes and points of their electoral campaign.

In the case of Matteo Renzi, we expected to find topics related to: economic activity, jobs, schooling, lower taxes and European cooperation. What we found from the comments was similar to the expectation, since some of the topics such as Economy, Election’s Program and Education. What was surprising was the lack of comment about European Cooperation. The confrontation with other candidates, especially with the Five Star Movement, was also clear. This, however, shows a lack of debate over the political issues: comments were in fact only in support or against the other political figures. Finally, one topic was just destined to the Encouragement of the candidate: Renzi’s supporters used the comment section to express their support and excitement about the candidate and its party. As for Di Maio we assumed that the main topics would be lower taxes and the universal income. These topics were discussed, alongside the typical rhetoric of change and dissatisfaction towards the current Italian political elite. More than for Renzi, the users commented a lot in favor of their candidate and the Five Star Movement. This clearly shows the reproduction of the main themes and topics within the party. The urgency to vote was also part of the topics of Di Maio’s page: since the party was not in a coalition, it needed a higher percentage of votes.

We expected the comments on Matteo Salvini’s posts to be focused on anti-immigration rhetoric, lower taxes, pensions reforms and Anti-Europe feelings. Through our analysis we found that the topics related to anti-immigration rhetoric, lower taxes and pensions reforms were discussed. No topics related to the Anti Europe feelings were highly discussed. On the contrary, we noticed that the users left a lot of aggressive and rude comments towards the other parties and politicians. In particular, in the case of the Anti-Immigration topic, there were a lot of words typical of the fascist propaganda. The users also praised their political leader as for the other candidates. The fact that the majority of the comments were related to the topics presented by the candidates on their page shows the lack of open debate on Facebook. This becomes even more clear if we consider that the majority of comments were a repetition of the rhetoric and slogans of the parties. As we have seen through the matrices, the comments for the candidates of the Five Star Movement and the Northern League were especially focused on themeselves and their party. This clearly shows the lack of debate on the platform.

At the same time, through the emotions matrixes, we also noticed that the users were less concerned about actual issues, and more interested about the politicians and parties themselves. This implies that there may be a strong personal element of politics, that is, that people may be more inclined to indicate an emotional response when it is related to a person. The personalization of politics is a common tool of populists, and our findings suggest that this is reflected in social media.