Political Information on Twitter: #elezioni2013 and the role of gatekeeper citizens

Thanks to the possibilities offered by digital media to produce and distribute content to a potential global audience, the political and civic engagement of citizens in public debate is thus expanded and simplified. Citizens can now produce and share their own political content, take part in public debate and influence the political agenda. This chapter takes up «the challenge for the political communication and information to understand if and how this way of participating in the public sphere “from the bottom” is having a knock-on effect on the traditional political sphere» (Boccia Artieri, 2013, p. 182). To do so Twitter represents a privileged observation point through which to analyse how citizens in their everyday lives can engage with media and politics. On the basis of the idea that Twitter is an integral part of the networked public sphere, we investigated the processes of disintermediation and participation that took place in this social network during the 2013 Italian General Election. In order to understand (i) which were the most shared sources of information used by citizens to discuss politics on the internet (mainstream media, bloggers, etc.), (ii) what kind of content (news, ironic materials, etc.) and motivations (engagement, endorsement, etc.) were involved in the spread of information, and (iii) how citizens contributed to the political discussion, we downloaded a corpus of tweets containing the most used umbrella-hashtag in the last Italian political election, #elezioni2013 and we carried out a content analysis of the hyperlinks contained in these tweets.