Media are a particularly relevant arena for studying the representations and social construction of corruption. However, the link between corruption and media, and especially social media, is a still under-explored research field (Berti, Bratu, Wickberg 2020). The studies about the relationship between media and corruption have highlighted the importance of press freedom in the struggle against corruption and, at the same time, the limits about the ability of the media to exercise a control over corruption. The watchdog role of journalism can be limited by some structural peculiarities of the media system capable of conditioning the produced news (Shoemaker and Reese 1996), such as media capture and politicisation of the media. At the same time, however, the spread of social media has introduced new possibilities for monitoring and curbing corruption, as well as important transformations regarding the role of the media system in the development of democratic processes.
In the case of Italy, with particular reference to legacy media, the traditional proximity of the Italian media system to politics does not represent a favourable condition for the media to play a significant role in fighting corruption (Mancini et al. 2017). But there is no research on the role played by social media. Aspects of social media as disintermediation and expansion of actors able to intervene in the public debate might support anti-corruption efforts. At the same time, other aspects of social media as polarisation might increase the political instrumentalisation of corruptive phenomena. The paper therefore intends to investigate what are the dynamics of the discussion about corruption on social media. In particular, do social media offer greater possibilities of contrasting corruption phenomena or can they exacerbate political polarisation?
To answer to these research questions, we have collected (through CrowdTangle) the posts of public pages (180,431) and groups (335,075) about corruption and anti-corruption on Facebook – the most popular social media in Italy – from 2018 to 2020. We analyse: (i) which actors addressed the issue of corruption and anti-corruption (politicians, traditional media, alternative news media, civil society actors, etc.), (ii) which are the main sub-topics and frames connected with corruption and anti-corruption. For this latter purpose, we use the QDA Miner tool, a program for the qualitative analysis of computer-assisted texts, and its quantitative component WordStat, a text mining tool capable of identifying recurring themes within the text. The actors will be categorised through a combination of techniques: 1) correspondence analysis (how the main pages and groups discussing about corruption and anti-corruption on Facebook are related to the sub-topics and frames); 2) coordinated shared links’ analysis (Giglietto et al. 2020); 3) classification of Facebook entities available on CrowdTangle.
This study has to be considered as a first exploratory step to analyse the “corruption” issue on social media. In fact, these analyses will allow us to cluster similar sources, with the aim of creating lists of categorised sources, which can be useful for future studies.
