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From Family Day to the Zan Ddl, this is how the anti-gender movement has made its way onto Italian social networks

The Scalfarotto bill against homophobia in 2013 and the Cirinnà law with the establishment of civil unions for same-sex couples in 2016. But also the Buona Scuola, which suggested promoting issues such as gender equality and prevention of gender-based violence and discrimination in schools, up to the Zan Ddl against homobitransphobia that was sunk this year. For years, ultra-Catholic, traditionalist, conservative and / or far-right parties and associations in Italy have responded to any attempt to take a few steps forward in the field of civil rights by waving a good obsession for all seasons: gender ideology.

Not without a certain degree of conspiracy, according to conservative rhetoric, this ideology (sometimes also called Gender Theory or Agenda Gender) would have the purpose of misleading children, sexualizing them from the earliest years and instilling in them "unnatural concepts and beliefs". Over time, any claims made by feminist movements and by those for the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex and queer people have been included within this extremely elastic category, from affective education courses to the promotion of gender equality, including the fight against bullying.

The clear-cut stance of various Italian institutions, including the National Order of Psychologists , which in September 2015 clarified that "promoting sex education in schools and inserting content concerning gender and sexual orientation does not mean promoting a non-existent gender ideology, but shedding light on the constitutive dimensions of sexuality and affectivity, promoting a culture of differences and respect for the human person in all its dimensions and implementing adequate preventive strategies and effective ones capable of combating phenomena such as homophobic bullying, gender discrimination, cyberbullying ".

That of the Gender Theory is a rhetoric which, since its ad hoc creation by some ultra-Catholic fringes in the 1990s , has never ceased to be useful for frightening and worrying, systematically muddying the waters of public discourse around issues that would need to be addressed. a very different attention and information.

What happens on Facebook
Social networks are not immune: a recent study carried out by the Italian researcher Nicola Righetti , who deals with computational communication sciences for the University of Vienna, tells it well. In his The Anti-gender debate on social media , Righetti reconstructed the birth and development of discourses against the so-called gender ideology on the Italian web, studying over 20,000 posts published between 2010 and 2020 on Facebook, the most used social network in the our country.

"A lot has been written on this topic in recent years: there are sociologists and political scientists who have dealt with it a lot and in a highly professional way, but online communication scholars have not dealt with much of the issue so far – Righetti told Italian. Tech – I wanted to fill this gap, especially because social media are increasingly important for public and political communication and for social movements ”.

One of the first things that the researcher noticed by analyzing the data collected with Crowdtangle (a tool that allows you to keep track of interactions on public content around certain keywords that appeared on Facebook pages, groups and verified profiles) is that attention compared to the theme it skyrocketed on the Internet between 2015 and 2016, in conjunction with the Family Day organized by characters such as Mario Adinolfi, Massimo Gandolfini, the Standing Sentinels and the Movimento per la Vita against the Cirinnà bill.

While in the square banners such as "Mum without dad is like bread without nutella" and "No to the theory of gender" waved, online the various no-gender pages have lashed out against gender education in schools for months, accused of being a Trojan horse of the LGBT lobby to promote fluid gender identities, same-parenting adoptions and a rented uterus. Another peak is seen in October 2016, when Pope Francis takes a stand against the teaching of gender in schools: "One of the problems linked to this movement is that it has triggered real phenomena of moral panic among parents , promoting the idea of the existence of an LGBT lobby that would promote brainwashing of children ”, explained the author of the study.

The moment of greatest interest has temporarily passed, "on Facebook the posts continue, but they are not as many as on the occasion of Family Day – Righetti told us – The analysis shows that it is above all the pages in favor of rights that keep this constant attention Lgbtia + and the pages of a religious nature and that refer to Catholic doctrine to support the critical issues of gender education and rights for homosexual people. On the one hand we therefore have the people who see these rights as a threat to their worldview , something morally incorrect and wrong with respect to the principles they believe in, and on the other hand the people directly involved in this propaganda against their rights. ".

The online role of parties
The universe of pages and groups that supports the existence of this all-encompassing theory (and promises to fight it) is jagged, but rather predictable. In addition to traditional religious media (according to the data, Radio Maria is also the master online) there are many pages that refer to political parties such as Lega, Fratelli d'Italia and the Popolo della Famiglia: "One thing that struck me is that, in the face of this volume of propaganda by the right-wing pages, which have a good hold online thanks to the emotional charge they are able to arouse with their messages , has not faced an equally strong opposing stance on the part of of center-left political pages ”, Righetti pointed out.

“The social pages of the Democratic Party or of Possibile have published very little on the subject, even if among the individual politicians most exposed on these issues we find Laura Puppato and Alessandro Zan. But if the pages of the League have almost 600 posts on this topic, those of the Democratic Party stop at around 100. Except for a few single exponents of the left who take a stand on his personal page, to counter this bombing there are not so many pages of the political left. , but those of associations ".

To further pollute the online debate there are then networks of pages and accounts that publish the same contents to a wide audience in a coordinated way: "They are pages already known for the dissemination of problematic information and disinformation , which suggests that the topic, being much debated and polarizing, it is exploited by editorial realities that want to make money on users' clicks to publish misleading news to obtain a profit from advertising on their sites ”, is the hypothesis of the researcher.

Particularly recurrent, in the tide of disinformation that exists on the subject, are the posts that trace a misleading connection between the Gender Theory and pedophilia : about 2% of all the posts examined trace this link, insinuating more or less indirectly that the gender education in schools has ulterior motives. "This is extremely problematic because it reinforces and creates prejudices and stereotypes against minorities that are already objects of hatred, discrimination and violence," commented Righetti.

His research stopped at 2020, therefore excluding the new wave of indignation aroused on the right by the attempt to introduce the bill against homotransphobia, misogyny and ability to act proposed by Alessandro Zan: according to Righetti, who during the he continued to monitor the issue of Crowdtangle during the year, but the new Bill has actually made discussions on online gender take off again. Since 2021 there have been over 70,000 posts (in Italian) on the topic, for a total of about 24 million interactions. The peak was between 27 and 30 October , after the bill was scuttled in the Senate on 27 October. During those 4 days alone, there were about 7 thousand public posts, for a total of 2.8 million interactions.

 

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