The construction of MSS imaginary through social media: what has the role of the Directorate been?

Over the last decade, the term populism has become increasingly popular. However, due to the mutability of populist movements and the diversity of the contexts in which they have developed, it has been difficult to place the different manifestations of the populist phenomenon within a single ideology. In fact, a populist narrative seems to resort to the cultural toolkit at its disposal, drawing from time to time on different components of the social and cultural environment in which it is immersed, without being crystallized in a coherent and static ideology. From this perspective, populism can therefore be traced back to the type of discourse used to frame a political event, in which the narrative component of the discourse is used strategically – or adaptively – to constitute a multifaceted and contradictory political identity to which everyone can refer even if not all the instances are shared. To investigate the hypotheses regarding the role of online communication in the construction of such populist narratives, we will analyse all the tweets produced by the three best known representatives of the Five Star Movement (Alessandro Di Battista, Luigi Di Maio and Raffaele Fico) from 2013 to 2019 by means of computational techniques. Starting from the works that have already defined the communicative style of the founder Beppe Grillo, our goal is to shift the attention to the Directorate, the plural leadership of the Five Star Movement innovative organizational structure and understand its role in the construction of the social imaginary connected to the party.