In the beginning it was the dining out experience with the Obamas , the prize experience up for grabs for donors and political activists who registered with their data on the platform developed for the 2012 US presidential election campaign. Trump’s turn, with the chance for donors registered on the donation website to win a meeting in Washington, complete with the president of the United States. Since all the experiences of successful political communication come with us at least five years late, today we find ourselves talking about the experience of the second Vinci Salvini prize competition, conceived in a manner very similar to the well-established examples of online involvement of electoral bases of US presidential candidates.
The mechanics of the prize competition are explained by the leader of the Lega himself in one of his most successful communicative performances as an arch-Italian (the video, deliberately in the style of a good presenter of 90s commercial television, is available here). The higher the number of likes and the speed of reaction to Salvini’s posts on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, the higher the score of the activist registered on the competition website.. You can win a phone call with Salvini, the diffusion of photos of the winner with the leader of the League to a “community of 6 million friends”, the meeting with the leader of the League for the most active on social networks at the end of the election campaign.
The game modality and game design techniques were highlighted. It is a technique increasingly used in other contexts, such as human resources, credit, finance, business consulting. The invitation to political participation on social media in the form of a game and to use them for electoral propaganda purposes. Pursuant to the competition regulations, the 2018 European privacy regulation, data such as name, surname, gender, date of birth, email, mobile number, references to FB, Twitter and IG accounts, are acquired and managed, pursuant to the GDPR. , municipality and province of residence. These data will be kept until the end of May 2020 and may also be used for the transmission of “information material and communications for electoral and political promotion., information on events, meetings, assemblies, debates, conferences, conventions and the like, sale of gadgets, publications or other, through the sending of traditional mail, e-mail, sms, mms, instant messaging platforms or through telephone contacts and for the elaboration of statistics to promote the development and activities of the Movement “. It is an excellent database, found at no cost to the political party, indeed, with the collaboration of political activists; it will make it possible to elaborate that micro-targeting of the electorates of reference , to which to send increasingly engaging and tailored political messages, which formed the basis of the electoral successes of Obama and Trump.
However, the criticisms of this method of acquiring data on electoral preferences in the VinciSalvini competition also tell us something about the right to privacy and how users of social networks interpret it today. If in the US, in terms of law, it is allowed to collect data on belonging to ethnic communities or on religious and sexual preferences (and see the success of Latinos and the LGBT community for Obama), the European system of protection of privacy provides for a different treatment for data considered sensitive, including political preferences. What will become of the like data on Salvini’s posts, complete with personal and contact data, stored on a server located in Europe, between now and the end of May 2020Who will have access to them and under what control regime
These concerns appear to be relevant in terms of law. However, they do not seem to be of much interest to Italian social media users, who perceive their sensitive data left online like the footprints left on the beach: they are ours because we left them online, but they remain available behind us. for anyone who has the technology to interpret them, making the “claim” procedure complex in real life.
Thus, in addition to revealing something about our idea of ​​personal data on social media, Vincisalvini obtains a triple political effect for the League and its leader: the possibility of tracing and obtaining data on the political preferences of the electoral base of reference on issues and topics; the opportunity to make political propaganda through the dissemination of content in the networks of relationships governed by the algorithms of social networks; the opportunity to create pseudo-events, such as the awards of the partial winners and the final prize-winner, and to build agendas also on traditional media (which do not cease to give space to the initiative). In short, a new frontier of full spectrum political communication, without spending financial resources. If the communication team that deals with these mechanisms for Salvini understood the usefulness of associating tools for electoral micro-donation with the competition, the entire system of Italian politics would be even closer to the US model.
