Veni, vidi, facebooked-live: Analysis of Matteo Salvini's success on facebook

Abstract

Many researchers have postulated an elective affinity between populism and social network, but few studies have addressed the specific features of online populist communication. This paper discusses the use of Facebook by Matteo Salvini, the leader of Italy's League party and the European politician with most followers on this social network. It specifically examines his use of livestreaming, with the aim of revealing the characteristic communicative tools of populism 2.0. The research takes a multimodal approach, triangulating three methods (digital, audiovisual analysis and clause-based semantic text analysis), and concludes that Salvini's discourse displays all the typical characteristics of populism: the innovation resides in its perfect adaptation to the affordances of the social network.