Eva Luna Villanova, Matteo Doldo, Eleonora Ricci, Margarita Kustiaeva, Nargiza Zhukabayeva, Silvia Cattelan, Indira Adambayeva

This project aims to compare two very different, but in some ways also very similar women in power: Giorgia Meloni, the Italian premier, and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, also known as AOC and a US politician. Far from focusing on the different ideals that these two women represent - the former is right-wing, the latter left-wing - our aim is to show how these two women use social networks to communicate with the public and how their way of communicating can have an effect on the country and on political elections. We chose this theme because we think that nowadays it is extremely important to be able to communicate via social media and because this new way of communication is very different from traditional ones; both of these women have succeeded in their intent and in creating a network of followers who in one way or another manage to understand and keep up with the Main Voice of the two female politicians they have decided to support and follow. The research question guiding our study is whether there are any correlations between the way these two women use social media and their political success, by considering also the theme of intersectionality. For this purpose, we searched for different examples of these two women's communication on different social media, limiting the search to Twitter and Instagram, which we considered to be the most used social media in the political field. This is because both Instagram and Twitter are the most widely used tools in general at the moment, and they are the platforms where all kinds of news can be read every day. We decided to exclude TikTok, for example, because it is a newer social media platform, but less dedicated to the political cause; despite this, Giorgia Meloni uses this platform to showcase her campaign; however, Cortez does not use TikTok directly (there are only fan-reported videos) and so we opted for two online platforms used by both of our women, so that both contexts could be analyzed equally. Starting precisely from Twitter, which works with a "trending news" mechanism, we were able to find the right material for our research. In fact, both Giorgia Meloni and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez use these social networks to talk about their politics and ideals, in a completely different way! Right from here, we combined the material we found, created the 3 podcasts, the website, and by analyzing the information we found, we answered the research question we had set for ourselves.