An Impossible Dialogue! Nominal Utterances and Populist Rhetoric in an Italian Twitter Corpus of Hate Speech against Immigrants

The paper proposes an investigation on the role of populist themes and rhetoric in an Italian Twitter corpus of hate speech against immigrants. The corpus has been annotated with four new layers of analysis: Nominal Utterances, that can be seen as consistent with populist rhetoric; In-out-group rhetoric, a very common populist strategy to polarize public opinion; Slogan-like nominal utterances, that may convey the call for severe illiberal policies against immigrants; News, to recognize the role of newspapers (headlines or reference to articles) in the Twitter political discourse on immigration featured by hate speech. The results show that populist themes compose 1/3 of the hate speech, displaying not only In-Out-group rhetoric, but also authoritarianism, mostly carried by Slogan-like nominal utterances. It also appears that news don’t convey much hate speech, while they compose almost half of the non hateful tweets.