Hate Speeches and the Radical Right in times of Pandemic: The Italian and English cases

As some pioneering studies have showed right wing groups are one of the main producer of hate speeches and fake news (Klein 2019). The COVID-19 pandemic created an even more fertile breeding ground for hate speeches. In fact, radical right actors have framed the COVID-19 in various different ways. Pandemic times have been also times of scapegoating on the others, the poor, the migrants, accused by right wing politicians of spreading the virus. Although this has led to growing (normative) concern within academia and the journalistic debate, so far there is not systematic (empirical) research on the topic. In this paper we address these issues, by investigating in a comparative way the relation between radical right groups and hate speeches online in times of the Covid crisis, looking in particular at how Italian and English radical right leaders and parties have framed the pandemic on social media (i.e. Twitters), during the first year of the health emergency (2020). Particularly, we examine the role of hate speeches in their communication about the virus. In terms of method and data we have collected tweets from the main radical (as well as mainstream) right leaders’ and parties’ accounts in the two countries from January to December 2020, for a total of 21.360 Tweets By carrying out a cross-national, and cross-organizational types (i.e. mainstream actors vs. the radical right) comparison of politicians communication online on the pandemic using Word-cloud, topic modelling and sentiment analysis, we aim at understanding the degree and forms of hate speeches presence in the radical right, namely if and how hate speeches emerge and thrive. We find that radical right leaders have managed to bring exclusion oriented issues to the agenda, albeit in different ways (i.e. emphasizing different understanding of ‘Us’ and different contents assigned to ‘Them’). These findings have important implications for our understanding of the role of radical right wing discourses in times of crisis, as well as, the internal similarities and differences of the radical right milieu.