Suppressing Visibility, Displacing Meaning. The 2025 Italian Citizenship Referendum across Television and X

This article examines how the 2025 Italian citizenship referendum, which proposed reducing the residency requirement for naturalization from ten to five years, was marginalized across television news and X (Twitter). It distinguishes two mechanisms often treated as one: the suppression of visibility and the displacement of interpretation. Drawing on scholarship on non-decision-making, agenda denial, and agenda-cutting, the article proposes reading these as points along a single continuum of visibility suppression rather than as competing accounts, and treats interpretive marginalization – through strategic framing and displacement onto pre-existing narratives – as a complementary, analytically distinct mechanism. Based on a content analysis of four prime-time television newscasts and a stratified sample of posts on X across the ten-week campaign, the study finds that both mechanisms operated, but asymmetrically: television visibility was gated almost entirely by a handful of governing-majority interventions, while X sustained more continuous debate that was nonetheless disproportionately colonized by identity and security-based framing. In a referendum system requiring a turnout quorum, both dynamics converged on a single practical outcome: discouraging participation. The findings contribute to political communication research by showing how visibility suppression and interpretive marginalization can function as complementary, rather than alternative, mechanisms of political demobilization in contemporary hybrid media systems.