Immigrations, styles and topics: A study about Italian politics tweet

Immigration has been one of the most relevant topics during the Brexit Referendum, United States presidential election, and Italian and European Parliament elections (e.g., Zappettini, 2019; Faris, Roberts, Etling, Bourassa, Zuckerman, & Benkler, 2017). In particular, during these events, the anti-immigration-political-groups gain consensus (Muis and Immerzeel, 2017). In this study, we investigate, with a text-analysis of 1000 Italian political leaders' tweets, which topics are associated with negative or positive sentiment toward immigrants. The results show that negative messages are associated, in a logistic regression model, with a populistic communication style, and with conspiracy suspicions. Moreover, a network analysis reveals that anti-immigration messages are associated with security and justice topics, whereas pro-immigration messages are associated with the topics of civil rights, culture, and Europe. Stylistics elements of populist and conspiratorial communication and their relation with the diffusion of anti-immigration contents and related consequences on composition and transmission of values, in social media context, are discussed.