"Un attentato quasi-terroristico". Macerata, Twitter e le opportunità dell'arena pubblica

The shooting that took place in Macerata on February 3, 2018, one month before the general election, gave rise to a flame war on Twitter that sheds light on the functioning of the public sphere at the time of social media. With a mixed-methods approach that allowed us to identify the frames around which 571,996 tweets aligned, we analyze the internal dynamics of the platform and the external ones, related to the public arena provided by the traditional media. In this way we show how the latter hindered the emergence of an interpretation of the event in terms of terrorism, silencing an emergent digital movement of opinion and making clear their role as guardians of the public sphere.