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Social media has significantly transformed how political discussions and deliberations occur, mainly by providing a digital realm for the public sphere. This study aims to analyse the extent of polarised opinions across Spain, Italy and the United Kingdom regarding COVID-19 during 2020 within social media. To do this, we examined YouTube comments (n=111,808) using automatic analysis and machine-learning techniques based on algorithms. This methodological strategy denoted an innovative and unique quantitative approach for this field of study. In line with previous research, the hypothesis was that the degree of polarization does not crystallize in the same manner in different countries' digital spheres. Therefore, it could be said that higher levels of polarization occur amongst Southern European countries like Spain and Italy (both countries adhering to a polarised pluralism model), compared to other countries ascribing to the liberal model (the United Kingdom in our study), which provides evidence supporting previous research studies. The results confirmed the hypothesis that the polarization of digital deliberation between Spain and Italy is higher than in the United Kingdom. But, also, the findings based on more disaggregated analysis suggest that the most polarized attitudes are even rewarded by other users in Mediterranean countries.

In June 2019, the captain of the sea-rescue vessel Sea-Watch 3, Carola Rackete, decided to dock on Lampedusa in spite of the ban promoted by former Minister of Interior, Matteo Salvini. The article underlines the role of newsmaking in politicizing immigration and fuelling three intertwined trends of the post-public sphere: manipulation of the debate, objectification of migrants and genderisation of the conflict. To highlight those features, we have analysed 250 articles from eight Italian online media outlets on the Rackete case. Through a frame analysis, we have identified how the process of ideology construction has started from the destiny of migrants in the Mediterranean Sea and ended in a geopolitical game that sees Italy and the European Union at the antipodes. The article looks at what happens when the objectification of migrants leads to their removal from the public sphere: new actors emerge as endowed with a political subjectivity, attracting all the attention in a framework of personalization and polarization of the political debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hate speech is very present in digital communicative ecosystems; although it does not originate in online communication, certainly the speed and pervasiveness of social media and digital platforms have played an important role in the processes of establishing such communicative practices. However, it is impossible to understand hate speech without placing it in the broader framework of information disorder and its relationship with the emergence of the platform society. This essay relates online hate speech to the practices of information disorder, which, moreover, are increasingly characterised as systemic and functional to the fragmentation of the public sphere. The essay also illustrates how manipulative dynamics not only feed the information disorder but tend to transform it into a new disinformation order, moreover functional to the information system at the time of neoliberal rationality. This is also why research on hate speech and the fight against online hatred become indispensable elements in the defence of democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Sardines "movement" emerged in the fall of 2019, giving itself mainly the purpose of countering the possible assertion of the right-wingers in the regional elections of 2020. The political discourse developed by this mobilization was characterized in an anti-populist and anti-fascist sense. The anti-populist register constituted the main mode of self-representation of Sardines. The political discourse of this mobilization is thus presented as, in some ways unprecedented, for an extra-institutional actor. The article addresses the following issues: a) the formal adequacy of the category of "social movement" to define Sardines; b) their constitution and development from November 2019 to November 2020; c) the key elements of their political discourse; d) the change in strategies and repertoires following the onset of the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines counterdisinformation policies to investigate how European countries are shaping the meaning and boundaries of social platforms' accountability. We describe the cultural determinants of social platforms' accountability through a content analysis technique that considered principles, actors, and instruments, resulting in four models of social platform accountability: accountability set by law, codecided accountability, regulated self-regulation, and pure self-regulation. Our results suggest that most of the 11 countries in this study maintain specific positions on the role of digital media in society. At the same time, some patterns of convergence were evident: the weakening of State control in favor of freedom of information; the enhancement of transparency in social platforms' politics-related activities as a guiding principle to ensure public monitoring; and the standardization of a multistakeholder model of coregulation. The article also focuses on the technological dimension of social platform accountability, enabling us to recognize the degree to which different models rely on algorithms. It then problematizes the limitations and risks of social platforms' accountability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The so-called crisis of representation has formed the theoretical framework of many studies on media and democracy of the past thirty years. Many researches have highlighted the crisis of legitimacy and credibility of the 'traditional' parties (Katz & Mair, 2018) and communication was considered, at the same time, one of the causes of acceleration towards post-representative politics (Keane, 2013) but also an indispensable tool for re-connecting citizens to politics. Various phenomena have developed within this framework: a) the birth of political aggregations as a result of mobilization in the digital ecosystem; b) the development of digital platforms for democratic participation; c) the birth of parties defined as 'digital' or 'platform'; and d) the growing centrality of digital political activism, both as a phenomenon within the digital communicative ecosystem (also in the context of social media) and as a result of the transformation of social movements. This article studies the role of platform parties as a space for the emergence of authoritarian tendencies (hyper-leadership) but also as an organizational opportunity for the development of new forms of digital activism. In particular, the article presents a research on the use of digital platforms (and their political and organizational consequences) by political parties in Italy, France, and Spain. The study shows the relationships between the evolution of digital ecosystems and the way in which political organization is organised, also highlighting how the new forms of mobilization and aggregation have opened up different yet interconnected public spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent decadesmore than anything else have revealed the ambivalence not only of the articulated expectations about the digital public sphere but also of the 'real' development itself. This thematic issue of Media and Communication high-lights some of the criticalities and specificities of the evolution of the public sphere during this period where digital communication ecosystems are becoming increasingly central. The different articles offer a polyphonic perspective and thus contribute significantly to the debate on the transformations of the public sphere, which--in the time of the Covid-19 pandemic--dramatically affect the very essence of our democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to illustrate the complexity of the relationships between digital participation spaces and organisations related to the Southern-European and US socialist traditions. Digital communication and, in particular, the various platforms of digital participation have been long living between the illusion of techno-libertarian thrusts and the technocratic tendencies framing the New Public Management approach. The suspicion of socialist-inspired parties but also of post-Marxist social movements towards the digital is connected on the one hand to the organisational structure of the parties and on the other hand to the capacity of neoliberalism to incorporate digital innovation in its cultural horizon. Participation platforms have often been functional to the emergence of a neoliberalism with a human face, capable of offering potential spaces of participation that depoliticise civic activism and transform it into a mere technical tool of minimal governance. In recent years, however, digital party experiences have developed in the context of left-wing organisations. In other cases, digital platforms have been used as tools of mobilisation and even as instruments for the creation of a new sentimental connections with the increasingly fragmented "popular classes". Digital has thus become a "space of struggle", in the same meaning it was used in the 1980s by Stuart Hall. This article presents the first findings of a research project on the use of digital platforms by: a) parties of socialist inspiration in Italy, France, Spain, Portugal and the USA; and b) bottom-up social movements. The analysis follows an empirical approach based on: a) the analysis of organisations; b) content analysis (Evaluation Assertion Analysis) of political and policy documents on the use of digital as a tool for political struggle; c) in-depth interviews to digital activists of social movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Open government is spreading throughout the world as a policy agenda oriented to foster transparency, participation and collaboration. Despite its increasing relevance in policy documents, there has been a scarce interest in deepening the analysis of how such agenda has been implemented in different national contexts. By adopting a multidimensional and multilevel perspective, we propose a qualitative comparative analysis of institutional digital platforms able to gather the evolution of open government in three European countries. We retrieved 979 open government platforms in France, Italy, and United Kingdom and analyzed them with an original set of indicators grouped in the three macro-areas of e-government, open data and transparency, participation and collaboration. Our study has methodological and policy implications: from the one hand, we provide the widest and deepest survey of open government platforms so far, contributing to the standardization of research methods on this field. From the other hand, we can observe that open government implementation is characterized by some typical traits, suggesting a trans-national convergence; this evidence is particularly prominent in the e-government and open data areas, whereas Participatory platforms are characterised by higher degrees of fragmentation both at the trans-national and at the intra-national levels. The analysis of open government platforms also reveals that, at the intra-national level, public administrations' approaches to digital government are not homogeneous, although at different degrees among the three countries involved in our study, suggesting the need of a better integration and coordination by central authorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we provide an overview of the main theoretical approaches to e-democracy, also considering that their history is intertwined with studies on e-government on the one hand and with research on digital communication on the other. In particular, we have explored the critical issues represented by the different models of e-government and e-democracy. Studies on digital activism have only recently met those on e-democracy, despite an apparent conceptual contiguity. The belated meeting between these two strands of research is to be found in the assimilation of many e-government/e-democracy practices in the context of neoliberalism and its tendencies toward depoliticization. The concept of platform arises at the intersection among studies on digital activism, e-democracy research, and the analysis of new forms of social organization: It seems to be able to constitute a common territory of research and mutual recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Open government policies (on transparency, participation, and collaboration, but also on digital technology) are spreading across Europe as a new governance model, but are not homogeneous across different countries. By adopting a qualitative computer-assisted analysis of policy documents from France, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom, we mapped the different meanings of open government by examining the specific measures and key motivations for their adoption in order to find out how different national governments frame the variables of open government. The article shows the emergence of competing models of open government: on the one hand, the hegemonic model of open government seems to stress innovation and openness in the sense of an enhanced transparency, and occasionally of public-private collaboration, but failing to achieve an open decision making. We have detected a paradox in the open government implementation: the economic lens, although softened by a drive toward innovation, anchors the policy-making process in already-consolidated mechanisms, rather than in substantive change. On the other hand, we can foresee the emergence of a different perspective on open government, which provides a proper policy framework for democratic innovations to develop. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to put in evidence the relationships between the digital democracy (e-democracy) and the rise of a global public sphere. To study the implications of the diffusion of the web based tools in democratic processes we need to analyse the technologies capacity of regeneration and reshaping of institutions and procedures of liberal democracies, including their potential to give new opportunities for political inclusion: from the e-voting technicalities to the web-based platform for civic participation to the creation of a new public sphere centred on discursive and participatory/deliberative practices (della Porta, Rucht 2013). This article frames the e-democracy and the open government processes within the perspective of the "public horizons" (Volkmer 2014), a concept more undefined but in the same time more functional than that of the public sphere. The article also provides an overview of the different experiences of e-participation and digital democracy, identifying the participatory democracy and the deliberative practices as social processes, suitable to overcome the ambiguous concept of liquid democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media has significantly transformed how political discussions and deliberations occur, mainly by providing a digital realm for the public sphere. This study aims to analyse the extent of polarised opinions across Spain, Italy and the United Kingdom regarding COVID-19 during 2020 within social media. To do this, we examined YouTube comments (n=111,808) using automatic analysis and machine-learning techniques based on algorithms. This methodological strategy denoted an innovative and unique quantitative approach for this field of study. In line with previous research, the hypothesis was that the degree of polarization does not crystallize in the same manner in different countries' digital spheres. Therefore, it could be said that higher levels of polarization occur amongst Southern European countries like Spain and Italy (both countries adhering to a polarised pluralism model), compared to other countries ascribing to the liberal model (the United Kingdom in our study), which provides evidence supporting previous research studies. The results confirmed the hypothesis that the polarization of digital deliberation between Spain and Italy is higher than in the United Kingdom. But, also, the findings based on more disaggregated analysis suggest that the most polarized attitudes are even rewarded by other users in Mediterranean countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]