Conclave and social, the most active papal is Filipino Tagle. Among Italians record mentions on X for Parolin

Filipino Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle is the most social among the papable candidates to succeed Pope Francis. On X (formerly Twitter), the cardinal has in fact collected around 149,000 mentions from 21 to 23 April and has a verified Facebook page followed by over 600,000 followers. These are the findings of the analysis company Arcadia, which notes that X is mainly the platform most frequented by the cardinals who will take part in the next Conclave.

After Tagle, among the most active on social media is Ghanaian Cardinal Peter Turkson, who has his own verified Facebook page with a tenth of Tagle's followers and has just over 77,000 mentions on X. The three Italian cardinals credited among the papabili - Pietro Parolin, Matteo Zuppi and Pierbattista Pizzaballa - have no social media accounts and among them the one who generates the most mentions on X is Secretary of State Parolin (over 42 thousand). South Korean Lazarus You Heung-ski also has no social media presence, but boasts almost two thousand mentions on X).

Scrolling through the analysis, Congolese Cardinal Fridolin Ambongo Besungu has over 31 thousand mentions on X, while Spaniard Juan Josè Omella has a verified profile on X with over 10 thousand followers and almost two thousand mentions.

"Monitoring and listening to digital conversations has long been a tool for understanding the mood of public opinion online," explains Domenico Giordano, administrator and data analyst for Arcadiacom.it, "and obviously, in the case of a election as unique as the one that takes place in the Conclave, this type of data has a very limited predictive effectiveness, but in any case it helps us to measure the ability of the individual cardinals given as papacious to capture our digital attention".