Political anatomy of a digital environmental controversy: Twitter reactions to Ultima Generazione’s protest at the Italian Senate

Disruptive climate protests ordinarily ignite digital controversies, which can be mapped out to understand whether such actions are effective at mobilising the public toward environmental issues, and why. In the morning of January 2nd 2023, a group of Ultima Generazione activists defaced with orange paint Palazzo Madama, seat of the Italian Senate in Rome. The present paper makes use of computational methods to investigate Twitter users’ reactions to this environmental protest gone viral. We show that a) while UG’s nonviolent action succeeded at giving visibility to climate-related topics, the majority of tweets in our dataset focused on the legitimacy and modalities of the protest; b) the Twitter reception of the protest is very mixed, with a slight majority of positive reactions; c) users who “follow” Twitter accounts close to right and centre-right positions tend to judge the protest in a negative way, and vice-versa. Our results indicate that the discursive surface of this digital environmental controversy is shaped by a deeper space of political position-takings.