This first introductive work tries to highlight and recreate the Italiaian "Right" network. Especially in this period (after the last victory of the Right-wing Coalition), in many case we heard talking about some return to Fascism. But it is really the case? We can say that parties, like Lega or Fratelli d'Italia, are fascist parties? A way that I figure out, trying to solve this dilemma, is to analyze the follower network of the Italian Far-right and Right-wings' main Twitter profiles, and see if they share common followers.
The main question is: is the Right-wing follower or community truly "fascist"? If so, I think that they would be likely to follow also the real Italian Far-right parties and groups. So the main hypothesis is: the ones who follows the Far-right communities and profiles would be more likely to follow also the Right-wing communities, but not viceversa, so the Right-wing followers will tend to follow only the Right-wing communities and groups.
In order to do so, I create publics list on Twitter, which you can see here:
- Far-right Culture: https://twitter.com/i/lists/1600967243881451521
- Far-right Parties: https://twitter.com/i/lists/1600600462612434969
- Right-wing Culture: https://twitter.com/i/lists/1601188241394237442
- Right-wing Parties: https://twitter.com/i/lists/1601142337874395136
The Far-right Culture contains newspaper, cultural associations, communities and musical groups (like "Il Primato Nazionale" newspaper, Presidio Milano or "Hobbit" musical group). The Far-right Parties contains the main parties and their youth movements (Forza Nuova, Lotta Studentesca, Casapuond Italia, Blocco Studentesco, Lealtà Azione, ...). The Right-wing Culture contains newspaper, cultural associations and public figure link to that political area (La verità, Buttafuoco, Daniele Capezzone, Nicola Porro, ...). And finally, the Right-wing Parties contains the main parties and political figures (Lega, Fratelli d'Italia, Giorgia Meloni, Matteo Salvini, Ignazio La Russa, ...). One clarification has to be made, due to the limited amount of "real follower" that the Far-right also have in the political elections, not only on social media, I took in my lists also all the local pages that I found of the far-right parties, in order to gain more network to work with, also because, for example, only Lega and Fratelli d'Italia togheter have a network of more than 200.000 follower, each. So to obtain some usable data I have done this methodological assumption.
The project workflow was so structured:
- Get a Twitter Academic API
- Make the list on Twitter
- Gain the data from Twitter
- Clear and export the data
- First graphical analysis of the data
- Conclusions