How does hatred spread in Italy? Mario Draghi dimision case

Abstract Social networks have become key environments for the propagation of disinformation and hate speech, facilitating the spread of rumors and stereotypes targeting specific groups and conditioning public opinion in the political arena.This article aims to estimate the influence of hater accounts, in shaping the debate on social platforms such as X, in promoting a polarized scenario of public opinion, during the period of Mario Draghi's waiver and dimision and the call for elections that preceded the triumph of Giorgia Meloni's party “Brothers of Italy”. We analyzed 796,654 tweets associated with the hashtags #Draghi, #crisidigoverno, #crisigoverno, and #DraghiOut, collected between July 12 and August 16, 2022. Through natural language processing, k-means analysis, and network analysis, it was possible to see how 17.18% of the associated messages contained hate speech with a low majority intensity, especially related to extreme right-wing movements. These messages were mainly grouped in six interconnected clusters, and some users had characteristic features common to those observed in strategies for the viralization of messages, as in the case of Astroturfing. The data shown help us to see a conditioning of the political debate generated in X, at the hands of users who took advantage of Draghi's dimision to disseminate expressions of hatred that may have favored a context of polarized public opinion in favor of a change toward other political projects in Italy.