‘Immigrants, hell on board’

Abstract

Social media platforms provide direct access to an unprecedented amount of content and can amplify rumours and questionable information. Moreover, when polarisation is high, misinformation can easily spread. Some studies have indicated that fake news and false information can spread faster and further than fact-based news, as it may be based on more stereotypical and less complex content. This research aims to examine racial misinformation. ‘Racial hoaxes are becoming a popular discursive strategy to disguise racism’. The main characteristic of racial hoaxes is that they are born out of the ideology of ethnic prejudice. Therefore, it is essential to shed light on these hoaxes’ socio-psychological characteristics to understand how to recognise, analyse and resist them. Based on these theoretical considerations, this research aims to analyse one hundred Italian news articles containing racial hoaxes collected in 2020 and 2021. For this purpose, a content analysis was conducted to code the psycho-linguistic features of subject description and mode, including stereotypes and components of journalistic attitude such as discrediting forms and affective lexicon. The analysis indicates that racial hoaxes have socio-cognitive features, stereotypes and evaluative forms of prejudice that can potentially lead to greater media reinforcement of false stereotypes because they are strictly associated with familiar and concrete linguistic forms.