While legacy media have received increasing attention in the literature on media and corruption in recent years, the role of digital media, and in particular social media, is still an open question in corruption and anti-corruption studies. In their paper “Bias and Polarization in the Qatargate Scandal: A Social Media Perspective” (Marchetti et al., 2024), the authors analyze the Qatargate scandal through the lens of social media, examining how these platforms contribute to the discussion surrounding corruption. The researchers demonstrate that digital platforms, such as Facebook, exacerbate the instrumentalization of corruption scandals, creating new biases while reinforcing old ones.
The study operates under three primary hypotheses related to the dynamics of public discourse around corruption on social media platforms:
- Social media platforms enable a wider range of actors, including non-institutional actors like ordinary citizens, bloggers, and alternative media, to participate in public debates about corruption.
- Traditional institutional actors, including political and media entities, continue to influence online discussions and often generate biased or instrumentalized narratives.
- Social media platforms provide non-institutional actors with opportunities to polarize or distort the corruption debate, often to serve partisan interests.
To verify these hypotheses, the researchers focused on Facebook discussions surrounding the Qatargate scandal between December 2022 and January 2023 in Italy. They collected collected over 14,000 posts from public Facebook pages and groups using a set of keywords related to Qatargate, and proceeded to analyze which kind of actors contributed to the discussion, which kind of sources of information they referred to, and which kind of narrative they were pushing.
The findings confirm the first hypothesis: social media platforms do allow a broad spectrum of actors to engage in corruption-related discussions. This includes a significant number of non-institutional actors who typically do not have access to public debate spaces dominated by legacy media. These actors, however, often contribute to polarizing the conversation, as evidenced by the presence of disinformation and clickbait narratives. Many of these actors exploit Facebook’s platform affordances to share misleading or inflammatory content, further complicating the discourse.
The second hypothesis also holds, as institutional actors influence online discussions. Despite the influx of new voices, traditional political and media entities still play a crucial role in framing the debate. This influence manifests through posts from legacy media outlets that retain their agenda-setting power, despite the diversified landscape of actors on social media.
The third hypothesis—that non-institutional actors contribute to the polarization of the corruption debate—is strongly supported by the data. The study finds that social media not only allow these actors to participate but also amplify their ability to spread partisan narratives and disinformation. The clustering of Facebook users around political ideologies reflects the extent to which social media platforms can be used to exacerbate biases rather than neutralize them.
In conclusion, while social media platforms like Facebook expand the public’s ability to engage with corruption scandals, they do so in a way that often amplifies the same biases present in legacy media. Both institutional and non-institutional actors exploit these platforms to further their own agendas, resulting in a highly polarized and sometimes distorted public discourse. This underscores the need for a more nuanced understanding of how digital platforms shape political discussions and suggests that social media may not provide the democratizing effects that many scholars and activists hoped for.
This blog post is based on Rita Marchetti, Anna Stanziano, Roberto Mincigrucci and Susanna Pagiotti’s article: Bias and Polarization in the Qatargate Scandal: A Social Media Perspective in Social Media + Society