Perception of Pandemic in Italy at Early 2022: An Analysis using Traditional and Social Media

Abstract

Aim: More than two years after the beginning of the global pandemic period, most governments have adopted questionable strategies, aimed at the progressive reduction of people freedom and pushing in non-transparent way on the forced use of genic drugs, improperly called vaccines. The purpose of this work concerns the different way in which news relating to pandemic reached italian people by traditional media (main TV channels and main national newspapers) and by social media, in particular Telegram. Methods: The paper considers the situation perceived in Italy up to the first months of 2022 by analyzing the news appearing on mainstream TV channels and how they are described by national newspapers, as opposed to what can be deduced from some social media platforms who are still enough free from a clear process of censorship. Results: The analysis underlines that there is a macroscopic discrepancy between traditional and social media; the official narration of the traditional media is not only questionable, but does not give rise to the possibility of a free discussion on the hottest issues of this pandemic. Only Telegram appears to be the most censorship free channel among the studied traditional/ social media in this paper. Conclusion: The attention placed on the official narrative of Covid-19, on the use of the methodology still in force in Italy for fighting the pandemic, on the strong non-sanitary limitation of individual freedom and on a possible underlying plan about what is globally happening, leads to the conclusion that in Italy there is an attempt to give an ambiguous, equivocal and inconsistent version of the facts, contradicted by experimental data and scientific papers appearing more and more numerous in qualified international journals.