Following the approval of the first law allowing same-sex civil union in Italy in early 2016, the Italian LGBTI movement has been advocating for the achievement of further steps towards full social inclusion of sexual minorities. In particular, the movement has consistently pressured parliament to finalize a draft law on homophobia, stuck in the backrooms since 2014. While such a law will not be passed before the general elections scheduled for March 2018, the idea that Italy needs norms to regulate and punish homophobia and homophobic speech has gained currency in public commentary. This narrative, however, is clashing with Catholic-right and far-right anti-equality narratives in the context of a broader backlash against social inclusion. With this in mind, this paper aims at identifying and analyzing the main narratives tweeted by institutions and private users at the Italian-speaking Twitter hashtag “#omofobia” during a one-month time span (May 8th – June 8th, 2017), covering the lead up and follow up campaign for the 2017 International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia (May 17th - IDAHOT). Analysis will refer to a sample of roughly 8,000 tweets retrieved through Twitter’s API and will be corroborated with reflections on screen-based observation carried out while events were unfolding. Early findings can be summarized as follows. While a part of these messages were celebrating or reporting on IDAHOT itself, a large part of them was advocating in favor of a law on homophobia. However, the substantially pro-equality space of #omofobia was not immune from incursions of anti-equality users arguing that homophobia is a non-issue and that a law regulating it would be detrimental to freedom of speech. While remaining somewhat marginal, these narratives did manage to gain visibility in terms of re-tweets and should therefore not be dismissed as irrelevant to the discussion.
