Abstract

The 2013 Italian general election has been labelled by many media and communication scholars as the “the first Twitter Italian general election” (Vaccari & Valeriani 2013: 1026). In this chapter we describe the 2013 electoral campaign from a social media perspective, comparing the use of Facebook and Twitter during months leading to the election. In so doing, we will show how different social media present different perspectives when it comes to political communication and how these perspectives can be fully be understood only if social media are framed within a continuum together with traditional mass media.