Decoding implicit hate speech: Italian political discourse on social media during the COVID-19 pandemic

In this chapter, I examine the main linguistic and discursive features of anti-Chinese and anti-immigrant discourse in Italian political debate on social media. I combine a top-down approach, focusing on politicians, and a horizontal approach, which analyses the discourses produced by other social media users. The aims of this study are to identify the implicit levels of hate speech found in the corpus and to describe the intertextual and interdiscursive construction of discriminatory and stereotyping language. Implicitness is a key element of online political discourse, since a politician’s goal is to induce the audience to perceive the world in the way the politician wants them to. In the study, the pragmatic analysis shows that some kinds of connectives (contrastive, correlative, and temporal) and certain adverbial phrases emerge as effective structures to convey such implicit messages. The vilification of out-groups takes place mainly through dehumanising and naturalising metaphors, which are more effectively unveiled by the discourse analysis. This level of analysis also confirms previously identified metaphors and stereotypes used for othering migrants; however, some topoi seem to be more commonly attributed to specific categories, such as unreliability and brutality being used almost exclusively in relation to the Chinese.