I controversi suicide games nel racconto del sistema informativo italiano. Effetti di agenda-setting, misinformation e dinamiche di influenza tra media

Within the vast and multi-faceted phenomenon of social media challenges – meant as digital contents built upon playful dares that encourage users to creatively (re)interpret a performance and share it on social networking sites – the so-called suicide games represent a controversial practice. Despite their limited or non-existent online dissemination, these alleged false viral challenges, which would directly or indirectly invite suicide, find a place in the Italian information system mainly because of their risky aspects. Thus, this paper investigates the journalistic representation of three well-known online “false challenges” (Blue Whale, Momo Challenge and Jonathan Galindo Challenge) as an ambiguous and contradictory topic that seems to be affected by the ways in which news, even unreliable news, is taken up and propagated through the media. In particular, by adopting the theoretical framework of intermedia agenda-setting as well as network agenda-setting, our analysis highlights the “co-orientation” of the narratives in the media. Indeed, the findings reveal the presence of consistent descriptive patterns in journalistic contents about fake challenges. These patterns not only frame the practice within a convergent and limited interpretive framework but also foster specific associations between themes, impacting the social representation of the topic.