Emerging Illiberal Counterhegemonic Publics? A Mixed-Method Study of Pro-Russian Discourse on Italian Language Twitter

There has been in the last years a growing interest among scholars in understanding 'influence operations' conducted by foreign states to steer the public opinion in their favour. Russia is often described as one of the main instigators, purportedly using a wide array of alternative media and establishing 'troll factories' to target online discussions. This proposed paper employs a mixed-method approach to understand the leading narratives that inform the pro-Russian discourse on a social media platform together with its influence. The original material was collected in September and October 2020, and it is constituted by over 6000 original Tweets and about 32000 retweets, written in Italian, discussing events related to Russia. By computing an edge list of the relations between Tweeting accounts and retweeters, it was possible to construct a directed network graph of all accounts involved in the discussion and identify those actors who display consistent pro-Russian views based on their mutual interactions. Indeed, the Louvain community detection algorithm defined the existence of three well-defined communities: pro-Russian, criticisers of Russia, and impartial media accounts. SNA influence measures (such as Indegree, hubs and authorities, and HITS) indicate the pro-Russian network as the most influential of the three. Moreover, a hashtag frequency analysis was performed to gain insight into the topics discussed by the different clusters. Unsurprisingly, the two communities returned vastly different focuses on discussion topics, hinting once again at the evident polarisation of discourse on social media platforms. In particular, the pro-Russian cluster displays narratives based on conspiracies and self-victimisation. Moreover, a qualitative discourse analysis of pro-Russian Tweets further revealed how currently unfolding political events tend to be discussed in the same way, by employing the same kind of narrative that sees a culturally decadent West in an all-camp fight against a resurging Russia, described in the tweets as a civilisational model. The analysis will display a series of such examples to understand better how this occurs and explore the possible implications, as the narratives presented easily feed into broader far-right stances. This research contributes to the understanding of the formation of illiberal anti-hegemonic online publics that are exerting an increasing influence by spreading and reproducing oppositional narratives endorsed by state actors.