Abstract
This study enquires on the reception and elaboration of state-led strategic narratives spread online that aim at influencing public opinion abroad to understand why they are positively received, especially by people close to the extremes of the political spectrum. The scholarship has profusely analysed such novel propaganda efforts but has ignored how and why such ideas result enticing to some. Such topic is particularly urgent since such practises, when successful, could foster polarisation, thus threatening the stability of democratic systems. To enquire on this phenomenon, this research relies on a case study analysing right-wing pro-Russian narratives on the Italian language online space. The bulk of the data consisted of website articles and tweets collected online through web scraping. This study employed a mixed-methods approach. Qualitative methods, and especially thematic discourse analysis, were used to understand the reasons for the adoption of such narratives. Moreover, quantitative text analysis methods uncovered consistent word patterns present in the text that contributed to validate the results of qualitative analysis. The results emphasise how such strategic narratives should be understood as part of a broader transnational phenomenon. Such narratives are appositely crafted with the aim of steering the conscience of those who are being affected by the cultural changes that interested the West in the last decades and majorly rely on the anti-modern discourse developed by the contemporary transnational far-right. Moreover, they also tend to create online communities centred around this type of discourse, thus highly susceptible to it and to criticism. This research attempts to shed light on this new phenomenon and provides systematic evidence of its relevance, thus contributing to addressing it to potentially aid the elaboration of tools that could help countering its effects.