Le tre fasi del discorso politico italiano in Twitter: una storia senza lieto fine?

The relationship between Twitter and Italian politicians started around 2010. Since then, it is possible to trace an evolution, and to identify three distinct phases that have characterised this relationship. This study describes some of the linguistic shifts that characterise the political discourse on Twitter, in its progressive move from the naive attitude to ʻbeing social’ of the beginnings, to the self-promotional monologue, up to the verbal excesses and forms of language aggression of the last three years. Through the analysis of corpora of tweets written by Luigi di Maio, Giorgia Meloni and Matteo Renzi, the focus is mainly on some of the lexical and discursive features that characterise this verbal aggression. The use of a rhetoric of simplification, through which politicians constantly tend to banalise and reduce reality to its extreme forms, strongly contributes to the diffusion of a highly polarised form of political discourse, as well as to our daily experience with social media.