Migration Speeches and Hate Speeches. the Sociological View on Migrants’ Representations between News and Ugcs in Europe

Every day migrations are represented by the language of politics, journalism, other media which significantly contribute to their collective perception and to the public opinion building processes. The pervasive presence of new media enlarges the complexity of the topic, as those allows an increasingly wide and diversified audience to access information and react with comments that enrich, transform, and redefine journalistic contents. In the digital public sphere each social actor is able to introduce information into the media circuit (mediator), redefining its significance in processing and sharing it (producer role) (Jenkins 2006) and building new frames (Goffman, 1974). Bloggers, social networkers, media activists or simple citizens involved in the information flow activate public discussions where each one broadens the field of his knowledge through a dense interaction with the others (Dahlgren 2009, 2013), even though this “distributed” word right doesn’t guarantee that it gives voice to a positive or public interest.

The story of migrations is perhaps one of the most sensitive and divisive narrative of the media landscape; user generated contents take part to the framing processes, even if they could often become a source of discriminatory arguments and of hate speeches.

Exploring and identifying which frames on migrations are arising in the contemporary society, sociology could contribute to understand better how social problems are collective built, opening new perspectives on them.

Through the analysis of readers’ comments on 3 Italian online newspapers (IlGiornale, Repubblica, Il Post) and on 3 European newspapers (Le Monde, The Independent, Frankfurter Allgemeine) we try to understand the shifting boundaries between professionals and prosumers contents and if these frames could favor or discourage discriminatory attitudes and hate speech, rediscovering how a sociological view could give advices to redefine and understand a central social problem that today put our lives at risk of conflict.