ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Sociol.
Sec. Media Governance and the Public Sphere
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fsoc.2025.1651055
Narratives of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict in the Italian press and social media
Provisionally accepted- 1University of Catania, Catania, Italy
- 2Universita degli Studi di Catania Dipartimento di Scienze Politiche e Sociali, Catania, Italy
- 3Unimercatorum Facoltà di Scienze della Società e della Comunicazione, Roma, Italy
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This contribution, focused on narratives of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, was carried out on an annual basis of articles published in two of the main Italian newspapers (in the online version), and of comments extracted from Twitter/X. The work looks at communication structure, language and content, and at possible points of contact between the two sources, as different forms of communication: one unidirectional and institutional, the other potentially bidirectional and choral. To understand the representations of the war in the press, we chose to focus on news headlines, due to their ability to capture attention through their language, which is generally direct and clear, and capable of summarising the content of the article. The selection of Twitter to reconstruct users' opinions is due, instead, to the specific role played by this platform in capturing opinions and attitudes with respect to the news disseminated by the selected newspapers. Useful information is extracted, with particular attention to the contents (it is thus preferred to reduce the number of comments by avoiding sentiment analysis in favour of a more controlled automatic content analysis procedure). The results show greater heterogeneity of sources and thematization on Twitter/X.
Keywords: news, War, social networks, Network analysis, Content Analysis
Received: 20 Jun 2025; Accepted: 05 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Gozzo and Fragapane. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Simona Manuela Gozzo, University of Catania, Catania, Italy
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