This dissertation aims to shed light on how the refugee crisis and online media interacted together and contributed to the rise of xenophobic and populist movements in Italy. In the first chapter we analyse the impact on far-right voting of an increased presence of refugees at the municipal level. We find that small reception centers lead to a decrease on far-right voting and hate crimes. This effect is driven mostly by municipalities that are less connected to the internet, which suggests that online media play an important role in the way migration is perceived. We also find that right-wing politicians are less likely to open such reception centres, possibly anticipating the negative electoral effect they might have. In the second chapter, we focus on the impact of a rise in salience of migration on hate speech online. We show that shipwrecks in the Mediterranean are an exogenous shock on the online conversation on Twitter and we show that in the aftermath of a tragedy polarization increases. While left-wing politicians and voters are less likely to express an anti-migrant sentiment after a shipwreck, right-wing ones are even more openly anti-migrant. Hate speech online is also correlated with an increase of hate crimes offline. In the third paper, we run an experiment to understand who consumes clickbait news and why. We find that older, less educated people who are more likely to vote for a populist party prefer online media. We also show that this preference does not come from taste alone, but from a perceived higher level of informativeness of such media by this population.