| Summary: | The article focuses on the online storytelling about the Xylella fastidiosa outbreak in the Apulia region (Italy), as represented by a collection of User-generated content retrieved from Facebook, Youtube and Reddit over a time span of 7 years (>16k comments). We examine the episode as a revelatory case of framing mechanisms that, in many technoscientific conflicts, enable two different reality construction strategies to compete almost on an equal basis: «canonical» scientific knowledge, and «alternative» contents (i.e. non-orthodox «science», local and traditional knowledge). We use Computer-Assisted Text Analysis (CATA) to investigate popular themes, and their semantic vocabulary. We find that discourses on Xylella fastidiosa are strongly polarized and structured around two tensions: «expertise vs political» conflicts, on the one side, and «scientific vs alternative» solutions, on the other. Then, we identify three main knowledge production strategies and introduce a typology of «alternative methods» and «cures», highlighting those formal traits that may have made them trustworthy for the general public. We nevertheless call for more research that may find a recursiveness in such framing mechanisms in the online representation of other technoscientific conflicts.
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