Populism, social media and immigration: The use of Twitter as a platform for anti-immigration discourse in Italy and the U.S.

This study takes the tweets shared by 45th president of the United States Donald Trump and Italian populist leader Matteo Salvini throughout 2018, to conduct a manual comparative content analysis in order to identify the main characteristics of their anti-immigration discourse on social media. The analysis aims to answer the following research question: How did Donald Trump and Matteo Salvini use Twitter as a platform for anti-immigration discourse in 2018? The ultimate goal is to consider the two leaders' anti-immigration discourse in order to identify the specific textual elements and emotional tone used to mention immigration and refugees in order to recognize the dominant frames and narratives employed. This includes the attempt to also determine the emotional tone, attitudes and opinions used to address immigration and immigrants by both leaders. The results indicate that the online anti-immigration discourse of the two political leaders included the identification of immigrants as an economic burden, as potential threats and, in general, as scapegoats of different issues. Few recent studies have addressed the characteristics of online populist communication in relation to a specific topic, especially not through the manual comparative content analysis of two political leaders coming from very different backgrounds. The purpose of this research is to fill this gap by supplying a framework for the analysis of the populist anti-immigration discourse on social media. This work suggests that social media can be used as a tool by populist leaders to construct an anti-immigration discourse that relies on the creation of a hostile narrative, a derogatory language and occasional mockery.