Current Perception of Epidemic between Traditional and Social Media: an Italian Case Study

Aim. More than two years after the beginning of the global epidemic period, most governments have adopted questionable strategies, aimed at the progressive reduction of the people freedom and pushing in a non-transparent way on the forced use of genic drugs, improperly called vaccines. The purpose of this work concerns the different way in which news relating to the epidemic reached citizens from traditional media (main TV channels and main national newspapers) and from social media, in particular from Telegram. Methods. The paper considers the situation perceived in Italy up to the first months of 2022 by analyzing the news appearing on mainstream TV channels and how they are described by national newspapers, as opposed to what can be deduced from some social media platforms who are still enough free from censorship. Results. The analysis underlines that there is a clear discrepancy between traditional and social media; the official narration of the traditional media is not only questionable, but does not give rise to the possibility of a free discussion on the hottest issues of this epidemic. Only Telegram appears to be the most censorship free channel among the studied traditional/social media in this paper. Conclusions. The attention placed on the official narrative of Covid-19, on the use of the methodology still in force in Italy for fighting the epidemic, on the strong nonsanitary limitation of individual freedom and on a possible underlying plan about what is globally happening leads to the conclusion that in Italy there is an attempt to give an ambiguous, equivocal and inconsistent version of the facts, contradicted by experimental data and scientific papers appearing more and more numerous in qualified international journals.