The Machine Behind the Man: Inside “The Beast,” Salvini’s Political Propaganda Engine

ABSTRACT

This article investigates La Bestia, a sophisticated digital communication machine built by Matteo Salvini’s team to dominate Italy’s political discourse from 2014 onward. Originally conceived as a tool for content amplification, the Beast evolved into a hybrid propaganda system integrating real-time data analysis, psychological targeting, and cross-platform message control. Drawing on journalistic investigations, technical sources, and political theory, the study traces the Beast’s development from its early prototypes to its peak during the 2018 elections, highlighting its use of emotional engineering, gamified loyalty strategies, and aggressive narrative framing. The article further analyzes the moral and legal controversies surrounding the system, particularly the 2021 scandal involving architect Luca Morisi, and assesses its decline in effectiveness following shifting political dynamics and public sentiment. By situating the Beast within a global ecosystem of algorithmic populism, the article reflects on how digital infrastructure reshapes political engagement, turning campaigns into ongoing identity rituals, and transforming leaders into media brands. The Beast is ultimately presented not just as a communication tool but also as a case study of the weaponization of platform logic in modern democracies.

The Origins of the Beast: Crisis, Code, and Capturing the Crowd

When Matteo Salvini was elected secretary of Lega Nord in December 2013, the party was in an existential crisis. Once a powerful regionalist force in Northern Italy, the Lega was decimated by corruption scandals and strategic confusion. Under Umberto Bossi, the party had advocated for the secession of Padania; now, it was struggling to stay relevant beyond its Lombard heartland. Polling below 4% nationally, the Lega appeared to be a spent force on the margins of Italian politics [11].

But Salvini saw this marginalization not as defeat, but as an opportunity. He envisioned rebranding: a transformation from the parochial Lega Nord into a national, populist, hard-right movement. And he understood that such a transformation would require more than policy shifts or alliances; it would need an entirely new language, a new image, and a new way to reach voters. He needed a communication revolution.

Enter Luca Morisi, a softly spoken, bespectacled philosopher from Verona who had quietly nurtured a second life as a digital systems developer. Morisi, although almost invisible in the media at the time, was involved in early online initiatives for local politics and was known for his deep interest in both philosophical theory and Internet-based communication. What set him apart was a hybrid skill set: ideological intuition and practical coding abilities. In 2014, Salvini brought him on the board as his digital advisor. This would prove to be a fateful decision.

The first version of what would later become The Beast emerged in late 2014 as an experimental tool called Diventa portavoce di Salvini (Become Salvini’s spokesperson). The idea was simple but clever: supporters who signed up would receive Salvini’s tweets and posts and be prompted to repost or retweet them automatically. At scale, this allowed Salvini’s message to surge through timelines across Italy within minutes of publication, giving the illusion of an organic wave of support [5]. In reality, this was an early form of coordinated amplification, the foundational tactic of the Beast.

By 2015, the infrastructure supporting this idea had begun to take shape. Morisi, together with his long-time associate Andrea Paganella, incorporated the Sistema Intranet, which began developing a proprietary content distribution platform. This platform would later be retrofitted with tools for real-time monitoring, sentiment analysis, message testing, and multi-platform posting. According to Morisi, the goal was to build something that “combined automation with intuition” [8]. Paganella, a trained IT specialist, focused on the backend; Morisi curated the front-facing strategy.

The duo and their growing team operated out of Mantua, far from the traditional centers of Italian media or politics: a choice that may have reflected their guerrilla mindset. They were building a weapon of asymmetrical political communication. By 2016, this weapon had received the name La Bestia.

The name was not arbitrary. In Italy, “bestia” connotes both brute power and unreasoning aggression. But it also suggests awe. Internally, the nickname was meant half-jokingly, yet it endured. As one insider recalled, “They didn’t try to hide it. They were proud of the name. It was their monster” [9]. Publicly, the first allusions came through the launch of Il Populista, a propaganda news portal created by Lega in 2016. Its slogan? “Libera la Bestia che c’è in te” (“Unleash the Beast inside you”) [5]. Around the same time, the party registered the domain liberalabestia.it.

"They didn’t try to hide it. They were proud of the name. It was their monster"

But what was the Beast exactly? According to Morisi, it was a hybrid platform combining scheduling, data analysis, auto-publishing, and visual content generation. More than a software package, it was also a philosophy of communication. It functioned as a centralized dashboard through which Salvini’s team could plan, test, and broadcast content across platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube) with military precision. But just as crucially, it served as a feedback engine by scraping user comments, sentiment trends, and keyword velocity to assess how messages were landing. If a post failed to generate reactions in the first few minutes, it was buried. If it took off, it was boosted again, often with graphic variations or cross-posts across Salvini’s official and unofficial pages.

At its peak, the Beast ran on a 24/7 human rotation, operated by a team of 35 to 40 social media managers, designers, analysts, and video editors, many under 30, many unknown to the public. This internal "war room" had one job: to keep Matteo Salvini present, relatable, and provocative online at all hours every day [8].

Unlike many other politicians, Salvini embraced this approach wholeheartedly. He did not delegate his online persona to the team. On the contrary, he performed it. He posted selfies eating Nutella, live-streamed pasta dinners, responded to fans by name, and let his social feeds document every handshake, every gelato, every police jacket he tried on. Morisi and his team dubbed him Il Capitano (The Captain), and fans followed suit.

Although the content was often banal or bombastic, the distribution was sophisticated. Each post was designed for virality. Facebook’s algorithm rewarded interactions, so posts were written to provoke comment: “What do you think?” “Would you agree?” “Share if you care about Italy!” Salvini’s posts were saturated with emojis, exclamation points, nationalist symbols, and photos of citizens either smiling or enraged, depending on the message. If he criticized the migration policy, there would be a photo of a dinghy or alleged criminal. If he praised Italian workers, it would be a selfie in a factory.

By 2018, this model had begun to pay extraordinary dividends. Salvini’s Facebook following exploded: from under a million in 2016 to over 3 million by mid-2018 [4]. On Instagram, he outpaced rivals with content that felt both populist and personal. In a digital ecosystem where authenticity is currency, the Beast helped produce a version of Salvini that simultaneously felt angry, funny, familiar, and omnipresent.

One of the most audacious evolutions came during the 2018 general election campaign: the launch of Vinci Salvini (Win Salvini), a gamified loyalty program where fans could earn points by liking, sharing, and commenting on Salvini’s posts. The top users ,  tracked through the Beast’s backend ,  would win a phone call or coffee with the leader. The data collection implications were significant: users were required to enter emails and social accounts, essentially surrendering their digital habits to the system [5]. However, this strategy was successful. The Lega soared to 17.4% of the vote in the 2018 elections, its highest-ever national score, and Salvini became Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior [11].

From that point on, the Beast moved from the experiment to the institutional engine. It was no longer simply a digital wing of the campaign; it became the core of the party’s message discipline, sentiment tracking, and voter engagement strategies. Critics began to admire grudgingly. “You can dislike what Salvini says,” wrote journalist Milena Gabanelli in her 2019 exposé, “but you cannot deny that his social machine is unmatched in Italian politics. It is cohesive, fast, and completely devoted to a single message: Salvini is always with you” [4].

Anatomy of a Political Weapon:  How the Beast Works

If the origins of the Beast reveal its political intent, understanding its technical anatomy exposes the machine behind the message. Far from being a loose collection of social media interns with Canva and Twitter passwords, La Bestia was (and arguably remained) a highly structured, semi-automated propaganda apparatus: part software, part doctrine, and part psychological warfare.

According to multiple insiders and technical analysts, the Beast functions as a centralized communications platform that integrates scheduling tools, graphic templates, content publishing, real-time performance analytics, and sentiment tracking across major social media channels, especially Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter [4][5]. It is this central dashboard that allows Salvini’s team to respond to news cycles within minutes, test message framing in real time, and deploy cross-platform messaging at scale.

Automation, Not Artificial Intelligence

Despite frequent claims that the Beast runs on AI, Morisi was quick to reject the myth of a sentient algorithm. “There’s no diabolical artificial intelligence,” he said in a 2021 interview. “There’s us. A team of people who know how to read the web” [8]. This modesty is strategic. In reality, while the system does not generate posts autonomously, it automates a wide range of tasks that allow for speed, consistency, and breadth. For example, when Salvini’s team publishes a message, the system automatically cross-posts it across platforms, adapting the format to suit each medium’s requirements: longer captions and images for Facebook, hashtags and punchy slogans for Twitter, selfies, and behind-the-scenes moments for Instagram. Simultaneously, the system begins tracking metrics: reactions, shares, comment volume, comment sentiment, geographic origin of interactions, and whether known “superfans” (top engagers) responded.

This backend intelligence allows the team to identify, within the first 30 minutes, whether a post is a “hit” or needs to be recycled with a different framing or graphic. It also alerts operators to emerging trends that can be hijacked for political messaging. As one former insider put it, “Every day, we had a radar of anger. We knew what people were mad about before the newspapers did” [9].

Twenty-Four Hour War Room

Automation is only half of the story. The human component is where the Beast earns its name. Salvini’s team, at the height of operations (2018, 2019), worked in overlapping shift cycles to ensure full 24/7 coverage.

Each shift begins with a briefing on current sentiment, top-performing posts, enemies of the day, and suggested narratives. Content would then be queued using pre-built visual templates: frame styles, fonts, and emoji layouts that made Salvini’s brand instantly recognizable. If a crime involving a migrant suspect occurred, the team had ready-made image formats with crime-scene aesthetics. If a European leader criticized Italy, they had templates for nationalist clapbacks.

Gamification and Database Building

One of the Beast’s most innovative (and controversial) features was its use of gamification to build loyalty and harvest data. The 2018 launch of “Vinci Salvini” offered prizes (calls, coffee meetings, book giveaways) to users who accumulated the most interactions, as measured by the Beast’s backend. Participants had to register with full names, emails, and social handles, creating a rich database of ideologically aligned, socially active users. Critics warned that the data collected: likes, shares, time spent on pages: constituted a micro-targeting goldmine, akin to Cambridge Analytica-lite [5].

While there is no public evidence that the data were sold or used for targeted advertisements, the mere existence of a privately managed supporter list raised concerns under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The Beast blurred the line between political outreach and the marketing funnel: every like, every comment was stored, mapped, and evaluated for future campaign cycles.

Real-Time Sentiment Monitoring

Unlike traditional campaign tools that rely on polls or focus groups, the Beast performs live social listening. This is not simply a matter of tracking trending hashtags or counting likes. Salvini’s team monitors comment clusters, looking for recurring words, emotional tone, and user subcultures. For example, when Salvini posted on immigration, the team would observe not only the number of interactions but also whether the comments were angry, sympathetic, or mocking. If a post provoked excessive backlash, it was revised or deleted. If it stirred controversy, they doubled down: controversy meant virality.

Morisi often emphasized that this process was manual, not algorithmic: “After so many years on social media, we just know what direction to take” [8]. Still, external consultants played a role. The Beast’s sentiment reports were occasionally supplemented by polling data from firms like SWG[1] , led by Professor Enzo Risso, and by analytics from the Milan-based startup Voices from the Blogs, which offered keyword clustering and trend projection [4].

This symbiosis between real-time emotional input and strategic message output gave Salvini’s team a rare advantage: they were not reacting to the news; they were shaping it in anticipation of the public mood.

Platform Specialization and Algorithmic Play

The Beast tailors content according to platform-specific algorithms. Facebook retains Salvini’s power base with posts designed to maximize comment threads and shares. Instagram serves to humanize aspects of life like family photos, pet videos, cappuccinos in cafés, and gym selfies (often shirtless, playing into a deliberately exaggerated “strongman” image). Twitter is employed more as a press room: short, sharp provocations intended to create headlines or bait journalists.

This content segmentation reflects a deep understanding of algorithmic logic. Facebook rewards “meaningful interaction”: hence the bait-like questions (“Are you with me?”). Twitter rewards frequency and heat, hence, constant repetition and controversial phrasing. Instagram, ruled by aesthetic and emotion, becomes the place where Salvini projects his “human” side: the caring father, the patriot, the smiling man of the people.

Even TikTok was briefly adopted. Salvini posted quirky, meme-friendly videos in an attempt to breach the youth market. While the results were mixed, the attempt reflected the Beast’s expansionist ethos: wherever there is attention to be captured, we will be present.

Community Amplification and the “Push-Button Army”

A critical pillar of the Beast’s power lies not in the posts themselves, but in the army of loyal followers ready to amplify them. Through newsletters, Telegram channels, WhatsApp lists, and Facebook groups, Salvini’s team deploys new content directly to thousands of super-engaged fans. These users then swarm the post with likes, shares, and emojis within minutes of publication: tricking platform algorithms to treat the post as “hot” content worthy of broader dissemination.

This strategy, known in digital marketing as “pre-seeding,” ensures that the Beast’s messages get early engagement, giving them disproportionate visibility. In earlier years, much of this was done through a Telegram bot nicknamed Bestiolina (Little Beast), which pushed links and instructions to inner-circle followers [8]. Although automation has since faded, the network effect persists. Salvini’s fan base has become self-organized, acting almost autonomously to inflate his digital reach.

Moreover, these supporters often coordinate to attack critics, journalists, and political opponents. Facebook pages like Esercito di Salvini (Salvini’s Army) and Salvini Premier ,  Capitano serve as digital barracks. If a critic posts a negative article, it is not uncommon for them to receive hundreds of hostile comments within hours, with many repeating the same phrases. While the Beast’s creators deny any direct control over this behaviour, the culture of organized virality is a deliberate product of its design.

“TRT” Strategy: TV, Rete, Territorio

The final layer in the Beast’s operation is its ability to synchronize real-world, digital, and media appearances. Morisi called this the TRT formula: Televisione, Rete, Territorio (Television, Web, and Streets) [5]. Salvini’s every move is coordinated across these axes. If he is scheduled to appear on a talk show, the Beast pre-alerts his base. During the show, his team live posts quotes and memes. Subsequently, the best sound bites are packaged into clips, re-shared across platforms, and covered by friendly outlets.

This triangulation creates a feedback loop: social buzz boosts TV ratings, TV coverage amplifies Salvini’s reach, and ground rallies, often coordinated via Facebook Events, provide visual content for further dissemination on social media. It is a self-reinforcing machine. As Morisi once put it, we chew every event to the bone, milking every reaction across platforms” [8].

Engineering Emotion: The Beast’s Language and Propaganda Strategies

The Beast’s architecture is technological, but its most potent function is psychological. It is not simply a content machine; it is an emotional engine. Its purpose is to generate affect: rage, pride, fear, affection, loyalty. Through calibrated language, visuals, and timing, the Beast turns political communication into a ritual of emotional validation.

This is where the system moves beyond marketing and into the realm of propaganda in the precise sense used by political theorists: the crafting of language to reinforce in-groups, simplify narratives, and redirect negative emotions toward selected out-groups. Salvini’s digital persona is thus not just built by content: it is built by emotive coding.

Rage and Fear: The Dual Engine of Viral Politics

From its earliest iterations, the Beast understood one principle above all: anger activates faster than reason. Posts designed to provoke outrage, about crime, immigration, EU rules, or political rivals, regularly garnered five to ten times more engagement than neutral or positive ones [4]. As such, the system heavily favored rage-inducing content.

The most reliable source of such content, in Salvini’s narrative, was immigration. Posts featured grainy images of migrant landings, alleged crimes, or inflammatory headlines, often using language such as “clandestine” (illegal migrants), “delinquent” (criminals), “saccheggiano l’Italia” (they are plundering Italy): terms chosen not for accuracy, but for emotional load [3]. Visuals were carefully selected: overcrowded boats, security camera stills, mugshots, and dramatic police footage. The copy was often minimal: just a few words, all-caps, punctuated with red emojis, and national flags.

These posts were not meant to inform; they were meant to provoke and polarize. They asked no questions and offered no nuance. If there was any ambiguity in the news event itself, it was erased by the frame: “Italiani per bene contro chi ci vuole invadere” (“respectable Italians against those who want to invade us”). These binaries (Us vs. Them, Italians vs. foreigners, police vs. chaos) were reinforced daily.

Fear, meanwhile, was cultivated through repetition. Even when crime rates declined, the Beast kept a steady stream of posts that implied Italy was under siege: by migrants, by Brussels bureaucrats, by “radical chic” elites. The message was clear: you are being lied to, but we are telling you the truth.

“Common Sense” vs. Elites: Framing Salvini as the People

Beyond fear, the Beast deploys another powerful affective register: resentment against the elites. Salvini’s posts are crafted in the voice of “common sense”: the language of the street, the bar, the family kitchen. He rarely uses technical terms or bureaucratic phrasing. Instead, he writes as a frustrated father, loyal friend, and proud son of Italy. His sentences are short, his tone is familiar, and his vocabulary is low-register, even deliberately ungrammatical.

This is no accident. The Beast’s strategy is to construct Salvini as the authentic anti-politician, the man who speaks like “us,” not “them.” His targets were chosen accordingly: judges, professors, NGOs, journalists, and European technocrats. These are portrayed as detached, arrogant, and hostile to “real Italians.” The trope is not new: it echoes Berlusconi’s “people against the system,” but the Beast gives it algorithmic intensity [2].

an example

In many posts, Salvini is not positioned as a commanding leader issuing top-down directives, but rather as a relatable citizen seeking counsel: “Cosa ne pensate voi?” (“What do you think?”). These seemingly innocuous rhetorical questions are a calculated strategy. They foster a sense of intimacy and horizontal engagement while subtly reinforcing his worldview. By inviting identification with the “common people,” Salvini's posts frame dissent not as legitimate disagreement, but as a deviation aligned with out-of-touch elites. Through this mechanism, La Bestia transforms populist discourse into a participatory performance, masking control as consultation.

The Emojis of Nationalism: Visual Lexicon and Repetition

One of the most striking features of the Beast’s language is its visual grammar. Salvini’s posts follow a recognizable format: Italian flag emoji 🇮🇹 at the start or end, fire emoji 🔥 for urgency, police car 🚓 or handcuffs 🔗 for crime stories, broken hearts 💔 for victims, and prayer hands 🙏 when invoking Christian values or national tragedy. The repetition of these elements trains followers to read posts even before reading the text.

The visuals, too, are formulaic: Salvini is often photographed with arms crossed, looking up, and to the right (a power pose). When addressing serious issues, he appears in a police jacket or among soldiers. When being “human,” he holds cats, babies, or plates of pasta. These images are usually centered, overexposed, and accompanied by slogan text in bold red font. The aesthetic lies somewhere between advertising and meme culture: direct, emotionally loaded, and designed for instant recognition.

The repetition is key. As semiotician Francesco Mazzucchelli argues, the Beast creates a “ritualized iconography” in which followers emotionally respond to recurring visual cues, much like religious symbols [7]. The red-white-green color scheme appears even when the post is apolitical, such as a photo of coffee or holiday greeting. Everything is branded, everything is nationalized.

Warmth and Intimacy: Constructing Salvini the Man

Yet the Beast is not only a rage machine, but it balances aggression with affection. For every crime post or EU rant, there is a photo of Salvini with his daughter, cooking risotto, visiting an old friend, or lit a Christmas tree. These posts serve to humanize him, especially among middle-aged and elderly voters who view authenticity and “normality” as virtues.

During the COVID-19 lockdown, this tactic intensified. While rivals posted institutional messages, Salvini live-streamed prayers from his living room, shared photos of home-cooked meals, and commented on national rituals like singing from balconies. The result was a sense of proximity: as if he were more than just a leader, as if he were a neighbor.

This affective duality, hard father and soft friend, mirrors populist strongmen globally. However, Beast perfects this formula. This does not allow one mood to dominate for too long. Rage was always followed by warmth. Attack posts were softened by personal anecdotes. The system maintains a constant emotional rhythm, creating a sense of narrative familiarity: we are fighting, but we are a family.

Language as Mobilization

Ultimately, the Beast’s language is not just expressive: it is mobilizing. Its goal is to convert passive agreement into action: likes, shares, votes, donations. To this end, most posts include calls to action: “Condividi se sei d’accordo” (“Share if you agree”), “Aiutami a far girare questa notizia” (“Help me share this news”), “Scrivimi cosa ne pensi” (“Let me know what you think”). However, these are not throwaway lines. These are algorithmically tuned imperatives.

Through this language, followers are not treated as audiences, but as agents and co-fighters in a digital army. Their engagement is not only welcomed; it is also celebrated. Salvini frequently reposts fan-made content, replies to comments, and addresses followers by name in live videos. The message is clear: If you fight for me, I will see you.

This mutual recognition is part of the Beast’s emotional ecology. It transforms the leader-follower relationship into a loop of loyalty, reinforced not through ideology but through affect. As journalist Steven Forti writes, “Salvini’s propaganda doesn’t offer solutions. It offers belonging” [3].

Backlash, Scandals, and the Limits of the Beast

For several years, La Bestia operated as a mythic force in Italian politics: invisible to most, unstoppable to others, and revered by its architects. But by 2020, cracks had begun to emerge. While Salvini still dominated social media metrics, his political momentum slowed. As critics sharpened their analyses and journalists shed light on the system’s mechanics, The Beast, once a symbol of digital mastery, was increasingly framed as a dangerous machine, blurring the line between political persuasion and manipulation.

The Gabanelli Exposé and the Turning Point

The first major public dissection of the Beast came in October 2019 when journalist Milena Gabanelli published a deep investigation into the system in DataRoom [4]. Her analysis broke down not only the technical structure of the Beast but also its psychological engineering. She demonstrated how the system created artificial virality by flooding Salvini’s channels with repeated content, emotional triggers, and coordinated engagement.

The report also drew attention to data collection practices, particularly the Vinci Salvini contest, which harvested emails and social behavior patterns. Gabanelli asked whether the system violated European privacy laws, especially the GDPR, by turning political engagement into a form of behavioral surveillance. Her conclusion was pointed: “This is not illegal: but it is unregulated. And it is changing how democracy works” [4].

The Fall of Morisi

The Beast's myth suffered its most serious blow in September 2021 when Luca Morisi found himself caught in a personal scandal. The police in Verona opened an investigation after two men accused him of supplying them with liquid GBL, a synthetic drug commonly associated with chemsex culture. The context of the encounter and Morisi’s admission that he had offered the drug voluntarily sparked a political firestorm.

Although the charges were eventually dismissed, the harm was already inflicted. For a man who had curated Salvini’s image as the “moral, Catholic, law-and-order” leader of Italy, Morisi’s fall was a narrative crisis. He resigned immediately from his role, citing “personal fragility.”

Political opponents pounced. While the scandal stemmed from Morisi’s personal life, it cast a shadow over Salvini’s public persona. For a figure so central to the curation of a moral, law-and-order image, Morisi’s fall raised uncomfortable questions, not about the machinery’s design, but about the gap between image and reality.

Criticisms from the Left and the Right

Long before the Morisi scandal, La Bestia had drawn sustained criticism, not only from the political left but also from former allies and digital rights advocates. Many observers argued that the system functioned as algorithmic populism at scale: reducing political complexity to meme warfare, incentivizing anger over dialogue, and mobilizing disinformation under the guise of “spontaneous expression” [2].

Others noted that the Beast often operated in the grey areas of platform policies. Though Salvini’s posts rarely contained outright hate speech, they flirted with the boundaries: using euphemisms, irony, or coded language to spread xenophobia, Islamophobia, and distrust toward institutions [2] .

Facebook, for its part, took no public action against the page, although Italian fact-checking groups repeatedly flagged content as misleading or decontextualized. A few posts were quietly removed, but the Beast's scale made real-time moderation nearly impossible.

Critics also worried about the normalization of propaganda. Journalist Jenny Covelli argued that the Beast had turned public discourse into a “competitive arena of outrage,” where truth was subordinate to click rates and aesthetic aggression [2]. Others feared that Salvini’s success would encourage copycats both in Italy and abroad.

A Model That Stopped Working?

Between 2018 and 2019, the Beast was unrivaled. Salvini’s online engagement dwarfed that of his rivals. His image was everywhere. But from 2020 onward, its dominance declined.

There are several reasons. First, Salvini’s political position shifted. After leaving the coalition government in 2019, believing early elections would crown him Prime Minister, he instead found himself sidelined. The Five Star Movement and the Democratic Party formed a new government and Salvini’s centrality in the national narrative diminished.

Second, the tone of public discourse changed, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. As fear and uncertainty gripped the country, Salvini’s usual rhetoric, anti-immigrant and anti-mask, began to feel out of sync. While he retained his core base, his broader appeal weakened. Meanwhile, new actors such as Giorgia Meloni adopted some of his digital techniques while appearing less polarizing to centrist voters.

Third, the Beast itself began to feel predictable. Its formulas, emoji-laden posts, angry slogans, selfies, lost their freshness. Critics have pointed out the repetitiveness. Memes that once appeared clever began to feel stale. In digital culture, novelty is power, and the Beast was running out of tricks.

Is the Beast Still Alive?

Today, Salvini’s digital presence remains formidable. His Facebook page still contains millions of followers. His Instagram is active. But La Bestia no longer inspires fear or fascination. It has become what all systems eventually become, part of the infrastructure, no longer novel, and no longer unbeatable.

After his fall from grace, Morisi attempted a low-profile return to politics in 2022, offering advice on regional campaigns. But his legend as a “digital genius” has faded. The term “Bestia” is now used ironically by both supporters and critics, as if acknowledging that the monster has become a cartoon.

Yet its legacy endures. The Beast did not just help elect Salvini; it changed how Italian politics functions. It introduced a new standard for emotional communication, algorithmic warfare, and leader-branding. This showed that a political party could act like a media startup and win.

Whether this model works in a more fragmented post-pandemic political landscape is unclear. But the question that the Beast has brought to light remains: What happens when democratic debate is handed over to machines designed to provoke rather than persuade?

The Legacy of the Beast and Its Global Echoes

By the time Luca Morisi’s empire began to crumble in 2021, La Bestia had already left an indelible mark, not only in Italian politics but also in the wider grammar of digital populism. Its rise paralleled, and in many ways anticipated, the emergence of what communication theorist Paolo Gerbaudo called platform politics: a form of governance and campaigning where the leader is less representative of a party than the avatar of a digital tribe [6]. In this model, followers engage with a brand, not a policy, or a persona, and not an institution.

Salvini’s Beast perfected this approach within the peculiarities of Italy’s media ecosystem, but its logic was never local. It echoed Donald Trump’s Twitter maximalism, Jair Bolsonaro’s WhatsApp networks, and Narendra Modi’s fusion of nationalism and digital fandom. Yet it also went further in one key respect: centralization. Unlike Trump, whose tweets were idiosyncratic and impulsive, Salvini’s digital persona was systematically engineered: crafted, tested, and deployed by a team operating like a newsroom and a marketing agency combined.

A Blueprint for Populist Infrastructure

Perhaps the most lasting legacy of the Beast is its transformation of political communication into infrastructure. Before Salvini, most Italian parties used social media as an afterthought, outsourcing posts to interns, recycling newspaper clips, or issuing sterile press releases. After the Beast, parties across the spectrum began to professionalize their digital arms: hiring meme-makers, sentiment analysts, and social strategists. Even opponents of the Lega quietly acknowledged their admiration. As one Democratic Party staffer put it anonymously in 2019, ‘We are fighting with pens, and they are using drones’ [5].

The Beast proved that virality was not luck, but a product of design, volume, and timing. This changed the expectations of what a politician should say, how fast they should react, and how available they should be online. Salvini’s model created a permanent campaign: one in which followers did not simply vote every five years, but engaged daily through likes, shares, and outrage.

The Algorithm as Political Actor

More deeply, the Beast highlighted the political power of platforms. Without Facebook’s engagement algorithm, the system would have had far less reach. Without the culture of Instagram intimacy, Salvini’s “human moments” would have landed flat. The Beast, in essence, turned private infrastructure into public influence. It hacked the emotional logic that platforms reward, anger, identification, and repetition, and weaponized them for political mobilization.

This dynamic raises uncomfortable questions about liberal democracies. If the rules of debate are set not by parliaments, but by Silicon Valley algorithms, what happens to deliberation? When attention is a scarce resource and rage offers the quickest path, how can nuances, truths, or compromise endure?

As theorist Shoshana Zuboff warned in her work on surveillance capitalism, when human behavior becomes the raw material of business, democracy becomes collateral damage [10]. The Beast did not invent this dilemma, but exposed it in action.

The Afterlife of the Beast

In 2022, Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia won the Italian elections and formed a new government. While her digital strategy was more restrained than Salvini’s, she adopted many of the Beast’s tactics: direct-to-camera monologues, emotionally charged slogans, and platform-native aesthetics. Yet, her tone was more composed, and her rhythm was less relentless. In some ways, Meloni succeeded by learning from the Beast’s excesses using its tools without copying its volume.

Morisi, meanwhile, faded from view, although he briefly resurfaced as a digital advisor for regional candidates. Salvini’s pages remain active, but their potency has waned. The Beast still posts, but fewer listen. However, the question is not whether the Beast is dead. The question is what comes next.

From Machines of Persuasion to Machines of Belonging

Ultimately, La Bestia was never just about persuading undecided voters. It was about creating a sense of belonging, a tribe that laughed, cried, and raged together. In this sense, the truest legacy may be emotional, not electoral. It taught politicians to be present in their followers’ daily lives, not as institutions but as companions. As Salvini often signed off in posts: “Un abbraccio, amici” (“A hug, friends”).

This emotional proximity, whether real or simulated, is the foundation of modern digital populism. It cannot be undone by fact-checking or regulation alone. It must be understood as a cultural transformation: a shift from reason to resonance and from information to intimacy.

And so, the Beast lives on, not just in Salvini’s feeds but in every campaign that replaces platforms of ideas with platforms of identity.

References

1. Bartlett, Jamie. The People Vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (and How We Save It). London: Ebury Press, 2019.

2. Covelli, Jenny. “La macchina della propaganda social: così Salvini ha trasformato la Lega in un brand.” Micromega, September 2021.

3. Forti, Steven. Extrema derecha 2.0: Qué es y cómo combatirla. Barcelona: Siglo XXI Editores, 2018.

4. Gabanelli, Milena. “La Bestia della Lega: come funziona la macchina social di Salvini.” DataRoom - Corriere della Sera, October 2019.

5. Garofalo, Giuseppe. “Chi sono i ragazzi della Bestia.” Rolling Stone Italia, October 10, 2018.

6. Gerbaudo, Paolo. The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy. London: Pluto Press, 2019.

7. Mazzucchelli, Francesco. “Iconografie dell’indignazione: comunicazione visuale e strategie emozionali nella propaganda populista.” In Populismo e Nuovi Media, edited by Giulia G. Cavaliere, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2019.

8. Open. “Chi c’è dietro la macchina della propaganda social di Salvini.” Open Online, September 27, 2021.

9. Orlowski, Andrew. “The Political Weaponization of Social Media in Europe.” The Register, November 2018.

10. Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. New York: PublicAffairs, 2019.

11. Corriere della Sera. “Il crollo di Morisi: droga, sesso e la fine della Bestia.” Corriere, September 2021.