This chapter presents the first empirical case study, examining how Italian political actors contributed to the criminalization of humanitarian NGOs involved in sea rescue operations on Twitter between 2017 and 2019. Focusing on a large-scale corpus of tweets, the analysis combines platform metrics, corpus linguistics, and qualitative discourse analysis to investigate how NGOs were progressively reframed within political communication. The findings show a clear shift from generalized suspicion to targeted and personalized attacks, in which NGOs—and eventually individual figures such as Carola Rackete—are constructed as antagonistic actors associated with illegality, threat, and the undermining of national sovereignty. The analysis highlights the central role of right-wing populist actors in driving this transformation, supported by higher levels of visibility, engagement, and discursive coherence. At the same time, it reveals how platform affordances and multimodal strategies contribute to the amplification of simplified, emotional, and polarizing narratives, ultimately producing one of the earliest empirical manifestations of “alternative otherness” in contemporary political discourse on immigration.