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Profiles more or less fake in action, like human bots feeding the claque, harmless Facebook pages which are transformed into tools of Renzian propaganda with hundreds of thousands of followers overnight. From the records of the investigation into Open Foundation to reality, albeit virtual: the modus operandi of Renzi’s Beast can be easily analyzed in the memory of the network for those who are familiar with the medium. The starting point is March 3, 2017, when Alexander Marchi, coordinator of the communication team, send to Simona Ercolani e Marco Carrai an email with the list of “our alternatives” attached. There is a pattern in it: 16 people manage a total of 128 accounts between Facebook and Twitter. They call them profiles’unofficial‘. The document is in the papers of the investigation conducted by Search from Florence. Ilfattoquotidiano.it analyzed the activity of these social media accounts and had the plastic testimony of how the company acted Beast by Renzi. Ursula Bassi is one of the members of the group in via Giusti, the one who dealt with the social communication of the former Rottamatore. From the diagram sent by Marchi to Carrai, among the various profiles she manages there are also those of Calogero Pizzuocco e Dante Fusi. From our analysis, the first turns out to be an elderly man who has a practically empty wall on Facebook, the second – he too over the years – has only one follower. Then there are the indefatigable Sandro Cortesi, particularly specialized in anti-grill propaganda, and such Giulia Courteous, which debuted on Facebook at the end of 2016 and which is busily active on the page dedicated to Homer Simpson, an example of how the Renzian consensus scheme on social media developed and the details of which we will explain later. According to the diagram sent to Carrai, the first profile is managed directly by the same Alexander Marchi, while behind that of Giulia Cortesi there is Armando Taccone, another of the guys from the via Giusti team.
The social scheme, among other things, is still in force now, although the share of ‘gentlemen none‘who are limited to the role of claque, giving way to pugnacious characters with the most captivating pseudonyms. Among these, the journalist’s troll stands out Maria Teresa Meli, a fictional character who strangely has not been suspended as the policy of Twitter, unlike what happened for the parody fakes of Matteo Salvini and of Gianni Alemanno. If, therefore, at present the verb of Italia Viva makes use of a troop of profiles that cannot be properly defined as ‘trolls’ and in any case corresponding to users who have a reasoned interaction activity, in the 2016 referendum campaign the exorbitant number of unknown accounts that raged in public discussions in Facebook groups and pages. A common feature of the human-like bots mentioned: they have no longer been active since spring 2017. In fact, in the months following the referendum, the activity of some fictitious users consisted of retweeting other people’s chirps or commenting on the big names of the Pd Renziani, almost as if simulating a consensus towards Renzi even after the referendum flop. Then it vanished irretrievably. Of course, the wing of the real voters of the Democratic Party was not lacking social they were ready to sacrifice themselves in discussions exhausting for the cause of the Yes al referendum constitutional. And it was not uncommon to come across gentle epithets such as “bitch” or to be surrounded by a circle of of the mind exacerbated. Of that turmoil of inflamed controversies remain rubble, on which a hard core of followers has certainly not been built: Renzian social communication still stands out for its bold tones, for a rich team of loyalists and for the daily reiteration of the usual themes that incite the diehards of the former premier (income of citizenship, Fatto Quotidiano, Giuseppe Conte). Without, at least for now, the ancient and stunning bombing of #senzadime and #bastaunsi.
Another technique was to infiltrate and change unexpected pages forever. The clear example is that relating to “800,000 registered for Homer Simpson as Prime Minister“. Until November 2016, the page was presented as a simple cauldron of aphorisms and puns from scattered celebrities. Born in 2011, updated in fits and starts and followed by a few users, it presented itself as one of many community that crowd the galaxy of Zuckerberg: pale jokes already read and re-chewed, images of the Simpsons, phrases from “good morning coffee”, philosophical gems taken from some bignami on the net. Then the metamorphosis, exactly one month before the vote for the constitutional referendum of December 2016: the pearls of Jim Morrison and of Marylin Monroe make room for a fierce pro-Renzian propaganda, earning that insignificant page over and above 300mila follower and transforming it into a real one anti-grillina phalanx who dropped gall memes every day, many of them sponsored to increase their visibility. And in fact the numbers speak for themselves: from a miserable ten shares, the posts of the page reached an increasingly numerous audience, reaching tens of thousands of likes.
If that page, no longer updated since May 17, 2020, still stands out on Facebook, a different fate has befallen other “good-journalists” pages with unsuspected and now defunct names, such as “I just want love”, “Day after day” and “Beautiful phrases”. These social shores have been promptly analyzed on vice.com gives Leonardo Bianchi, which collected several screenshots of the typical posts of the pages: arrows against the 5 Stars and in particular against the coordinator of the pentastellata communication Rocco Casalino, warlike memes in favor of the Yes to the referendum, exaltation of Matteo Renzi, often proposed as a counterpart to the former prime minister Mario Monti (“With the excuse of sending Renzi away they bring Monti back….!”, Reads a post on the page “I just want love”). The strategy of the Renzians was chiara: to convey political propaganda through explicitly named pages, such as “Basta un si” (also deactivated after the referendum) and at the same time use communities that have names that cannot be referred to politics. But not only. As mentioned, the tactic also involved using publicly known names to conduct the referendum campaign and at the same time make use of unknown users to convince the undecided: from the elderly man with only one follower who comments compulsively and enthusiastically Renzi and Boschi to the lady who puts the hashtag # bastaunsì in a tweet about the earthquake that hit central Italy in August 2016. Everything is consensus.