Us and Them: The linguistic and visual representation of ‘the other’ through Facebook pages

This paper addresses the linguisti c and visual representati on of contemporary migrati on from the Third World in social, cultural and politi cal terms through the analysis of three popular Italian Facebook pages. The analysis of the posts, conducted in November/December 2017, aims to investi gate the administrators’ atti tude towards the welcoming of immigrants, which may infl uence the users’ atti tude (Boswell et al. 2011; Komito 2011; Volpicelli 2015; Chouliaraki/Stolic 2017). The general role of Italy in the so-called ‘migrant crisis’ is universally acknowledged for obvious geopoliti cal reasons, but it sti ll needs to be scruti nized, especially as regards the role individuals play in the creati on of public narrati ves and discourses of dissent/consent. In fact, it is necessary to broaden the study of how stereotypes are created and spread not only through offi cial and nati onal media, but also through large communiti es of individuals who, on one hand, exercize their freedom of speech, but who, on the other, are responsible for the strati fi cati on of populist and xeno-racist discourses that, both linguisti cally and visually, represent migrant people as a threat to the supposed cultural, ethnic and religious ‘purity’ of Italy and Europe. It is commonly agreed that social media, such as Facebook, target vast and varied audiences and that they are responsible for the spreading of both meaningful and non-meaningful informati on through the use of both language and images. These modes of communicati on are employed in an extremely connoted way, which is investi gated in this paper using the interdisciplinary perspecti ves of both Criti cal Discourse Analysis and Multi modality (mainly Kress/van Leeuwen 1996, 2001; Wodak 2008; Machin/Mayr 2012; van Dijk 2015).