Salvini and Di Maio also secured about 7.8m Facebook likes and shares each during the two-month campaign. Their nearest rival on Facebook was Giorgia Meloni, the leader of the small populist far-right party Brothers of Italy, whose posts secured 2.6m Facebook likes and shares. “You can speak to the people’s guts on social media much better than on big media,” he said. There is growing academic interest in the relationship between social media and populist movements on both the left and right. Some researchers claim an algorithmic change enacted by the social media company last January to combat fake news and downgrade news content had the unintended consequence of fuelling protests.

Source: The Guardian December 17, 2018 09:17 UTC