The next session at the DigiWorld network ECREA preconference on election campaigning in Brno starts with Anita Bonetti, whose focus is on in civility on social media platforms. Such in civility can be strategic in hybrid media systems: incivil content can go viral, and be picked up and amplified by mainstream media outlets. Incivility has been studied increasingly in recent years, but we still lack a longitudinal and comparative perspective. This paper explores this for the Italian political context.
This study works with posts on Facebook by Italian political parties during the 2014, 2019, and 2024 EU and 2018 and 2022 Italian elections. It uses a multidimensional definition of incivility as impoliteness, institutional delegitimisation, and individual delegitimisation. It used three different LLMs (Gemini, Mistral, and DeepSeek) for automatic zero-shot classification of incivility, and tested their agreement as well as agreement with two human coders.
Percentages of definitely incivil posts were low (below 5%), but generated disproportionate engagement; interestingly, both Giorgia Meloni and the Movimento Cinque Stelle were more incivil before they were electorally successful than afterwards; right- and left-wing parties used incivility differently; and incivility on Facebook and Instagram, once far more prominent on Facebook, aligned over time. Incivility is predominantly directed at political opponents, but the most frequent targets are social groups and minorities.
