Affective Polarisation

The use of emotional language by Italian news outlets on Twitter

Autori

  • Alice Baroni Università degli studi di Padova
  • Giulio Rigoni Sapienza Università di Roma

Parole chiave:

journalism, emotion, affective polarisation, Italian news media, Italian Twittersphere

Abstract

Journalism has a conflicting relationship with emotions, and thus scholars are divided in the critique about the nexus between emotions and professional ideals in journalism. While some authors argue that emotions ought to have no place in journalism, as they challenge established notions of objectivity and impartiality, others recognise their value and precise role in calling into question hidden power relations within the classic liberal journalism tradition. Yet the fast-changing digital media environment in which news media organisations must fight for news users’ attention on social media has redesigned mainstream news production and distribution, and made some authors proclaim an “emotional turn” in journalism (Wahl-Jorgensen & Pantti, 2021). Studies that link social media, news and emotions mainly focus on the audience-centric perspective, aiming to assess which types of emotions increase the sharing potential of news stories and virality (Al-Rawi, 2019; Hasell, 2021). These studies also focus on the differences between the uses of emotional expression by partisan and non-partisan news media, predominantly in the UK and US contexts. In this paper, we build upon Iyengar et al’s (2019) notion of “affective polarisation” to contribute to this discussion by extending the investigation to the Italian news media and Twittersphere. Differently from the liberal journalism tradition, the Italian media system is representative of the Polarised Pluralist Model or Mediterranean that is considered to be strongly politicised and exhibits significant levels of parallelism (Hallin & Mancini, 2004; Papathanassopoulos, Giannouli & Archontaki, 2023). Methodologically, we deploy machine learning techniques for sentiment and emotion analysis to almost half million tweets retrieved from the pages of eight Italian news outlets on Twitter (recently rebranded as ‘X’). Namely, Il Fatto Quotidiano, Corriere della Sera, Il Post, Fanpage, La Gazzetta dello Sport, Il Sole 24 Ore, La Repubblica, HuffPost Italia. This aims to address a twofold research question that asks: How do different types of news outlets use emotional valence and language in tweets? Which types of emotions trigger more engagement with news users? We also hypothesise that the more partisan a newspaper is, the more it uses negative valence and language, in addition to speculating about news engagement with negative posts. The findings open up new avenues for further investigations about the interplay between partisan media and emotion, alongside journalists’ intentionality and strategies for crafting the affective composition of news content.

Biografie autore

Alice Baroni, Università degli studi di Padova

Alice Baroni is currently a STARS @ UNIPD research fellow in the Department of Political Sciences, Law and International Studies at University of Padova. She is Principal Investigator (PI) of the TRISKELION project, ‘Artificial Intelligence in the News Media’s Democratic Performance: Journalistic Practices, Digital Engagements and Policies’ (2022-2024). In this project she uses AI technologies as a starting point for a critique and investigation of the precise role of AI in co-shaping the news ecosystem in Italy and Finland. Her research interests lie in intercultural dialogue(s) and knowledges; (visual) ethnographic and participatory research in contexts of urban/ digital violence; AI-powered journalism; AI regulation, media policy and gender equality.

Giulio Rigoni, Sapienza Università di Roma

Giulio Rigoni received the MSc in Computer Science from the University of Padua in 2017. Following a brief experience in IT, he pursued a grant focused on cyber-security and joined the SPRITZ Security and Privacy Research Group led by Prof. Mauro Conti at the University of Padua. He then enrolled in a PhD program in Mathematics, Computer Science, and Statistics at the University of Florence, where they focused on drone security and applications, earning their doctorate in June 2022. In August 2022, he began a PostDoc position in the Department of Political Science, Law, and International Studies (SPGI) at the University of Padua, working on the Triskelion project, which studies social media interactions between users and news outlets using machine learning systems. Currently, Giulio is an Assistant Professor at Sapienza University of Rome in the Department of Computer, Control, and Management Engineering, specializing in cyber-security topics.

Pubblicato

2024-08-03

Come citare

Baroni, A., & Rigoni, G. (2024). Affective Polarisation: The use of emotional language by Italian news outlets on Twitter. Mediascapes Journal, 23(1), 46–66. Recuperato da https://rosa.uniroma1.it/rosa03/mediascapes/article/view/18439