Scar-Facebook · Organized Crime and Populist Digital Media Politics in Contemporary Naples, Southern Italy

Scar-Facebook: Organized Crime and Populist Digital Media Politics in Contemporary Naples, Southern Italy

The interactive forms of mass communication that define digital platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram strongly intersect with the institutional life of modern democracies, as they act as "echo chambers" for numerous controversial populist political groups. As my Ph.D. dissertation demonstrates, this is particularly evident in historically marginalized social spaces, such as the urban peripheries of Naples in Southern Italy. In these areas, radical far-right movements (like Lega Nord and the Neo-Bourbonic Movement) and violent criminal organizations (such as the Camorra) frequently use social media to gain support from the local poor and create networks of political patronage. Despite their troubling effects on civic participation and public safety, these informal political dynamics are unsurprising in the Italian context. Indeed, recent Italian politics illustrates how digital media—and their ability to facilitate direct connections between people from different social backgrounds—play a key role in the global spread of contemporary populism. This communication method allows diverse social groups (e.g., unemployed individuals, precarious workers, and middle- and upper-class citizens) to engage with state power as a unified political entity (e.g., "the people") by emphasizing their shared opposition to perceived external groups (e.g., minorities, the so-called "establishment"). Following the Berlusconi-led reforms of national media in the mid-1990s, scholars have identified Italians’ engagement with populist media narratives as a distinctive form of late-capitalist politics. This trend became even more pronounced in the late 2000s, when the increased participation of the Italian poor in online social media contributed to the electoral success of Internet-based populist parties, such as Beppe Grillo's Five Star Movement and Matteo Salvini's Northern League. As a result, Italian digital populism helped set the stage for a global trend. The ongoing mediatization of populist politics not only infiltrates the institutional life of the countries involved but also perpetuates the mediacratic traits of institutional populism within various informal politico-economic entities. This includes "Mafia-like" criminal organizations that have historically held power in the southern peripheries of Italy. As my Ph.D. dissertation demonstrates, for instance, the Neapolitan Camorra has heavily invested in local music production, TV channels, and digital media platforms since the early 1990s. This criminal organization frequently co-opts and reshapes the discourses, aesthetics, and digital strategies typical of far-right populist parties and movements for its own purposes. By doing so, the Camorra build and strengthen extensive networks of politico-economic patronage with its lower-class online followers, which subsequently intersect with local institutional politics through indirect forms of governance. Recent social science literature has increasingly expressed concern about the growing influence of informal digital mediation dynamics within both Italian and transnational contexts. Despite growing scholarly attention to the rise of "underworld politics" and the global circulation of violent populist rhetoric, most studies focus on archival research and quantitative data rather than qualitative methods. As a result, they have yet to fully explore the socio-cultural narratives that drive Italy's lower classes to seek informal, digital patronage from populist political actors—whether legitimate or not—and the profound effects these dynamics have on late-capitalist popular culture and the democratic functioning of state power. These methodological limitations have hindered the development of comprehensive theoretical frameworks, which could guide NGOs and public officials in crafting targeted policies to address the intersection of digital populism and organized crime. How do licit and illicit processes of digital networking work together to reinforce populist politics in the most socially vulnerable areas of contemporary democracies? How do these online dynamics influence the socio-cultural lives of Naples' poor, particularly in terms of political mobilization? What public policies, media regulations, and grassroots interventions could effectively address the structural violence and indirect governance produced by these populist forms of digital mediation in Naples and beyond? My project aimed to answer these questions by offering ethnographic insights into the informal online networks and patronage systems that link current Neapolitan Camorra-inspired cultural operators, populist political operators, and their respective lower-class followers. It did so by employing innovative qualitative research methods, blending ethnographic techniques —participant observation, open-ended interviews, and life-story collection—with "netnographic" analysis techniques characterizing the fields of digital media studies and digital humanities.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз