Programma della conferenza

Populism and social media share an electoral affinity. The affordances of the most popular digital platforms allow populist leaders to bypass editorial filters, algorithmically amplify sensational claims typical of their communicative style, and gauge the 'will of the people' in real time. While early studies of populism on social media focused overwhelmingly on written messages, recent years have seen a growing interest in the visual aspects of digital populism. Nevertheless, several areas remain under-explored. For example, while many have focused on how populist leaders discursively and visually construct 'the people' through their profiles, little is known about how people construct 'the leader' through images posted on social media.
To address this gap, our study examines a corpus of over 10,000 images posted to the X (formerly Twitter) hashtag #SilvioBerlusconi on the day of Silvio Berlusconi's death (13 June 2023). We approach this corpus as an example of memory activism, in which members of the public come together to commemorate the passing of 'the leader', visually constructing his legacy through the accumulation of images that reflect their personal interpretation of his persona. Our aim is to isolate those moments in Berlusconi's long and controversial political career that the public considers 'iconic'. Accordingly, we set out to identify two types of images: discrete icons (singular photographs of particular scenes that are famous for being famous) and aggregate icons (variants of the same scene that consolidate its popularity by portraying it from different angles and perspectives).

We followed an abductive iterative process involving several rounds of (a) manual screening of the corpus to identify potentially recurrent images, and (b) machine-assisted identification of identical or extremely similar images in the corpus using a custom algorithm we developed. This analysis revealed that the corpus is dominated by aggregate icons referring to three aspects of Berlusconi's persona: the success of the football club A.C. Milan under his ownership and presidency, his irreverence in institutional settings during his time as incumbent Prime Minister of Italy, and his personal friendship with controversial foreign leaders (notably Mu'ammar Gheddafi and Vladimir Putin).
Based on these findings, we offer the following empirical, methodological and theoretical contributions of our study. Empirically, we highlight how Berlusconi's collective memory revolves around a narrow set of discrete and aggregate icons that largely reproduce the same tropes that Berlusconi himself associated with his persona. The popularity of these tropes gestures towards the success of Berlusconi's own self-branding operation, now consolidated in public memory as part of his legacy. Methodologically, we propose an innovative process for the study of large corpora of digital images, using computational methods but with a focus on human interpretation of visual input. Theoretically, we show that studying the bottom-up representation of 'the leader' on behalf of 'the people' offers new insights into the interrelationship between the two key themes of populism. Analyses such as ours can shed new light on how voters interpret, refute, or repurpose the personae that politicians carefully construct in their campaign activities.